Quotes from George Michael

The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up gramophone that mum had thrown out into the garage. My parents gave me three old 45s - two Supremes records and one Tom Jones record - and I used to come home from school literally every day, go out to the garage, wind this thing up, and play them.

I mean, it is the perfect situation to really love someone to death and to want to rip their clothes off at the same time, isn't it?

I left school at 17 and was a star by the time I was 18 - in certain parts of the world anyway.

When someone is always going to be there for you. I meet people like that all the time, but I have this unfortunate attraction to people I think I have to fight to become friends with.

My depression at the end of Wham! was because I was beginning to realise I was gay, not bi.

There are things about my mum that I only realised later, things that make me admire her.

I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me other than how hairy I am.

I had very little fear about it, but basically, my straight friends talked me out of it. I think they thought as I was bisexual, there was no need to. But it's amazing how much more complicated it became because I didn't come out in the early days. I often wonder if my career would have taken a different path if I had.

By the time I was in my early teens, we were able to move into a much more middle-class area. I had a comfortable adolescence.

I want the people who came to listen to have a good time as well. So it's a matter of playing a control game when all I really want to do is go out there and sing.

I find it difficult enough as it is to keep some kind of normality in my life. I enjoy this experience, but I don't know where I'm going to take my career.

I'm looking back to a period of my life when I was badly hurt and then looking at another time when I felt I had things going for me again, so I suppose there is a theme [of the Faith album].

[Wham!] totally changed my life. It would be very difficult to know how it changed me as a person; you'd have to ask other people that.

I'd been out to a lot of people since 19. I wish to God it had happened then. I don't think I would have the same career - my ego might not have been satisfied in some areas - but I think I would have been a happier man.

I try very hard to thank my lucky stars and keep it all in proportion and perspective, but it can be very tiring having a smiley face all day.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

I just hope that I'll stay around musically for as long as I can. I love to think that I will still be satisfying myself and other people as a musician until the day I die.

In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend every day praying that I didn't come across that virus. She'd have worried like that.

The fact I had my father as an adversary was such a powerful tool to work with. I subconsciously fought him to the degree that I drove me to be one of the most successful musician in the world.

I used to believe that George Michael was a total actor. It was self-defeating, because it made me also feel fraudulent.

The main downside was that it [fame] happened so quickly and I didn't have time to establish what kind of person I wanted to be.

I define my sexuality in terms of the people that I love.

I have no belief in The Bible or religion, but I think Armageddon was a lucky guess. I honestly think it's going to happen.

There is no such thing as a reluctant star.