Top 249 Quotes & Sayings by George Michael - Page 3

[My mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.

50 percent of the people I perform for have come to scream at me and the other 50 percent have come to listen to the music.

"Yog" is an abbreviation - my real name is Yorgos, which is Greek for George.

When you shake you ass, they notice fast. And some mistakes were built to last.

Playing with Queen was the biggest moment of my career. It was like living a childhood fantasy.

I can't talk about Kathy [Jeung] anymore, because she doesn't want me to talk about her, and I'm not even sure that it's an ongoing relationship.

Yet ["One More Try" ] really seemed to connect with people, which is a wonderful thing and a marvelous coincidence.

We [with Andrew Ridgeley] didn't expect people to take it seriously. But naturally they did, and they thought we were a couple of wankers.

Take back your picture in a frame. Take back your singing in the rain. I just hope you understand sometimes the clothes do not make the man.

Satire is used for political purposes all the time, but obviously there's a time and a place. I think in the current climate, it can be very difficult to speak your mind, but sometimes, I believe, we're all in danger and I think this discussion needs to be widened.

I have definitely reached the same level as Madonna in terms of sales. I'm really pleased about that.

I can't believe that I've written my best work yet. If I believed that, then I wouldn't bother releasing music anymore.

That feels natural to me, singing in a small group of people I just can't do. You'll never hear me sing at a dinner table or anything, but this feels kinda natural. I've done it many, many times. So, and also, the pressure's off me cos I'm not singing on my own. I'm just doing a few harmonies with my stuffed nose.

[My family] is one of the strongest families you're ever likely to see.

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.

I'm perfectly happy to admit that insecurity. It doesn't bother me. It's there, just the same as the color of my eyes is there. I'm never going to get rid of it. I'm not going to wake up one morning and really like the way I look, but as long as other people like the way I look, that's fine.

The most common misconception people have had in the past is about my own control and calculation of my career.

[My father] was more than apprehensive. He didn't think I stood a chance in hell. He had no confidence in me whatsoever and was convinced that I was going to be coming to him for money when I was 40. We argued about it constantly.

Sex is natural, sex is good/Not everybody does it, but everybody should

George was the easy part. As for Michael, I had always liked the name, and my father's brother is named Michael. I thought it was a good idea because there are a lot of Greeks in England with the second name of Michael; as a child I had a Greek friend whose second name was Michael. It was like getting the name that I wanted without having to get rid of the Greek element.

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.

Teacher, there are things that I don't want to learn.

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?

People run on and off the stage, but usually they're removed before they get to me. It's not really frightening. There's always the possibility that someone's going to take a potshot at you; you take that risk when you perform in front of thousands of people.

I got to say hello to Snoop Dogg. I got to, I was being barged out of the way by his bodyguards but I got to say hello to him which was cool.

I guess I was about 15. I wore glasses at the time, and I remember [first girlfriend] sitting on the floor at a party, one of those school parties where everyone is getting off with each other. I remember her taking my glasses off and saying something very complimentary about my eyes or whatever, and I was just so pissed off because I was convinced she was taking the piss out of me.

I truly believed that tonight would never happen, that I would never sing these songs to you again. But then I'm a fool, which you've probably worked out by now.

There are very few things in my life that I can't have if I want them. So when I see something that I can't have, immediately I'm obsessed by it.

I have been taken for a ride a couple of times. I've been hurt by people who I've had a 90 percent possibility of being hurt by.

I was supposed to be a real Thatcherite. Just by dint of being a first-generation immigrant and having not had money, and then suddenly having it - and getting on planes and going to Ibiza and sitting around in thongs. But actually nothing I was writing or doing was even vaguely Thatcherite.

My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion - 24 hours a day for years.

The word that pisses me off - "prepubescent."

Both of us knew the band had run its course. We were both unhappy doing it, but I think the way Andrew [Ridgeley] was being treated as the less important half of the duo had finally taken its toll on him.

This stuff [marijuana] keeps me sane and happy. I'd say it's a great drug - but obviously it's not very healthy.

[Music From the Edge of Heaven] wasn't really an album at all. The band had made the decision to release an LP and then split up. We wanted to go out with a bang in Britain and the rest of the world by having a single that was four songs, not just one song. But we couldn't do that over here because we couldn't release a single without an album.

I'd never touch anything. I think it's foolhardy to play around with the face that you've been given. To have a little snip or a tuck, I think, is really quite obscene.

All we have to see is that I don't belong to you, and you don't belong to me.

My music is some of the most honest music that's been released and I think that's why people buy it.

I'm a perfectionist. It's a big pain in the ass and it takes a lot of my time, but it really is going well and I have to do my own things.

When I write and produce something, I know exactly how I want it to sound, and I have a very strong interpretation of it. I can't really think of anyone at the moment I'd particularly like to play a duet with. You never know, though, I might receive an offer tomorrow and say, "Yeah, that'd be great." But it's not something that's on my mind.

As I became George professionally and everyone called me George, Yog became the name that people who knew me from before started to use. It became more valuable to me.

I couldn't change anything without changing the end position, and I'm perfectly happy now. So whatever I feel in some sense may have been a mistake in the past is, in another sense, not a mistake, because it's left me here.

I get along really well with [my father] now, but I had a terrible time with him in my teenage years. All we did was scream at each other, and when we weren't screaming at each other, we just wouldn't talk to each other.

It's an incredibly limited sphere those tabloids have, isn't it? Basically, they can accuse people of being gay and they can accuse people of taking drugs, but they can't get any more sensational without entering into the realm of incredibly bad taste.

This is a very fickle business. It's really about how much you value the other things in your life. I still value too many other things more than I do fame.

Obviously, [Wham!] made me a lot more comfortable as a musician. I was very confident that I would become a successful musician, but I had no idea I would be a celebrity.

I had my very first relationship at 27 because I really had not actually come to terms with my sexuality until I was 24.

I don't really feel I deserve something if I haven't had to fight for it. It's not a conscious attitude, and it's stupid and wrong. Sometimes you do deserve things without having to put yourself through agony.

I also think I could probably repeat the commercial success; whether I want to or not is a different matter. I think there is still better work inside me.

The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.

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.

Andrew [Ridgeley] and I had demoed a couple of our songs very cheaply, and we weren't expecting any kind of record deal. We just walked around with our demo tape, trying to find someone to give us the money to demo properly. Instead of that, we got a record contract. It was just an incredibly lucky break.

I suppose maybe if I had been an attractive child, I would have had less inclination to push my physical presence.

At a certain age I just stopped arguing. I realized that there was no way [my father] could see, because for him to approve of what I was doing, he would have to have some belief in me as a musician.

It's the ones who resist that we most want to kiss, wouldn't you say?

Basically I see that song as a bunch of images which I threw together to represent the fact that I was seeing one girl and then I started seeing another, and it was just the guilt in between those two periods. The ballads I've written since have been about things that really hurt me.

[My mother] pretty much used to go along with my dad in that she wanted me to get an education so that if this incredible dream I had didn't work out, I would have something to fall back on.

It does bother me when they [tabloids] drag friends of mine into it and talk about them and lie about them. My friends have no part in it; they're not celebrities, so why should they have to accept the downside of celebrity? That worries me for a bit.

I have two sisters. My father is Greek and comes from a family of seven. My mother is English and comes from a family of five.

I think I'm getting there, but it's very hard to perform at my absolute peak when an awful lot of people come just to make their presence known, when the lights go down and all you can hear is people screaming.