John Grant

“I realized that a lot of the things I had been telling myself about not being good enough just weren't true, and 'Queen of Denmark' gave me the chance to prove to myself that I could do something real.”

“Being embraced by the British people is a beautiful compliment for me. It feels very special.”

“The lead character in 'Adaptation' is pretty much me but with more talent. Every time I watch 'Adaptation,' I feel very emotional because it makes me be kinder to myself and see the human situation a little more clearly.”

“There's a lot of anger in 'Queen of Denmark,' and that's me getting political.”

“I'm not saying that I don't have skills. I'm saying I don't feel like I can use my skills to achieve self-esteem. I feel like it's cheating. I think that I should have self-esteem simply because I am a human being who deserves love and deserves everything just as much or just as little as everyone else.”

“'Ernest Borgnine' is sort of my version of Woody Allen's 'Purple Rose Of Cairo' in that it's about the occasional difficulty of coming to terms with the cold hard facts and the temptation to escape into another world - like movies, for example. I'm a pro at escaping.”

“I'm a seriously flawed individual, but I guess everybody is.”

“I think I have a great voice, but it's not special enough to be remembered. But what's special about me is much more than just my voice.”

“I can only live in the world of truth, inasmuch as I'm able to be truthful with myself at any given point, on any given day.”

“For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that's what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I've worried about my whole life.”

“I had never considered myself a political guy, but there are certain things I can't shut up about. When I hear people say things like, 'If 'we' allow gays to marry, then people will want to marry animals and children,' I can't just stand there.”

“I feel like, every single decision I make and every single album I make, it's all about letting go. Letting go of the past and just getting on with it.”

“The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.”

“I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.”

“In order to not have to deal with being gay in the world, you have to control everything. You try and walk in an un-gay way so as not to be found out. You try to control every situation, check the people around you, that you're not in the wrong place, and that can be exhausting. It goes on for decades, and it becomes mental sickness.”

“The 1980s were all about synths for me, and it never went away after that.”

“I don't really listen to my old music.”

“When I reached my senior year in high school, I fell into a hole that took a couple of decades to get out of.”

“Me becoming a person, instead of somebody who just hides and is afraid, has happened in tandem with me learning to write music and become a good songwriter.”

“The lion's share of what I listened to in the Eighties, what really affected me, was coming from Britain.”