Quote

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle!

As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway.

Of my infancy I can speak little, only I do remember that in the fourth year of my age I had the measles.

I'm very much in favor of vaccinations, and I've been very vocal about that because it's insane to forgo this.

When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.

My mother was a listener. I'm a talker. I'm very comfortable talking.

As a kid, I was told to talk as much as possible.

I had a galvanised voice: I could sing through a 105 fever or a flu or a root canal or anything that you could throw at me.

I was a sickly child, contracting tuberculosis at the age of five.