Smith's front man Morrissey

 Morrissey, the celibate singer who rose to fame with the band The Smiths, has said he believes humans are "solitary creatures" who survive better on their own.

He said: "Everyone is, in fact, alone. Being contractually tied to another person - in marriage, for example -accentuates the loneliness, because you have effectively allowed the state to determine your obligations to someone, as if you can't trust and manage your own feelings by yourself."

"Anyway, I see humans as essentially solitary creatures, and this is not changed by surrounding ourselves with others, because they, too, are solitary. Life is a very serious business for the simple reason that nobody dies laughing."

The former Smiths star also admitted he found life "relentlessly foul" as a teenager and was astonished when he found fame because people were so willing to listen to what he had to say.

Asked his aspirations when he was young, he told Rookie magazine: "My greatest aspiration was to make it through the coming week. As a teenager I found life to be inevitably disgusting, and I could see no humanity in the human race."

"When my time in music began, I found all my goals were reachable. For the first time ever in my life, I spoke and people listened. I had never known such a thing previously. My life as a teenager was so relentlessly foul that I still can't believe I actually survived it. Perhaps I didn't..."

The 53-year-old singer still doesn't believe he's grown up and doesn't think anyone ever truly becomes an adult

He added: "I am still my teenage self. If you think that we all step through a door marked Adult, or that we sign a Grown-Up Document, you're quite wrong. We remain as we always were, and that, alas, is one of life's many nasty tricks."