You have to embrace the people that love you because you're making a difference in people's lives, and you're making them feel something with your music. That, I think, is the biggest key: to stay grounded and focused and stay true to who you are as a person.

As mathematics had been my best subject at school, my parents proposed - and I accepted - studies at the University of Lund in mathematics, statistics, and economics. The choice of the latter subject is said to be due to the fact that at the age of five years, I was very fond of calculating the cost of the various cakes my mother used to bake.

We all have our painful pasts we have to get through.

I think when I first realized that something interesting had happened was probably in 1994. There was a 25th anniversary of the ARPANET celebration and... somebody asked the question, 'Where did email come from?' I remembered that I had done this little program back in 1971. People looked back and nobody could find anything that predated it.

If the worst thing that can happen is that nobody laughs, then I can deal with that, because the worst thing that can happen at the factory is that I could lose a limb or be crushed by a huge machine.