Robert Plant

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

The trouble is now, with rock’n’roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.

You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside – so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

I hate cliché. And when you’re a rock singer in 1966, or whatever it was, psychedelic blues, through to the ’70s, which we know all about, and the ’80s, which was a scramble to hang on in, and the ’90s, which was a great time for experimentation…to get to this place, I’m really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I’ve been involved with.

[On encountering the music of Umm Kulthum] I was intrigued by the scales, initially, and obviously the vocal work. The way she sang, the way she could hold a note, you could feel the tension, you could tell that everybody, the whole orchestra, would hold a note until she wanted to change.

[on British Red Cross album to assist and create awareness of Refugee Crisis] The position we are in, it’s paramount we all do our best one way or another to help.

Touring is tough. You’re almost in a haze because you don’t really know where you are half the time: You’re in a hotel room one moment, and the next thing you know, you’re onstage performing for 60,000 people, then you’re back on an airplane. It’s very hectic and I couldn’t do it without my family.

Some people misconstrue our band just to be a commercial venture.

[on Brad Pitt] I don’t know… I guess…. he’s a nice person and a GOOD kisser!

I hope we left you with something to put under your pillow.

[On Joni Mitchell] If I didn’t talk to her for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t miss her for a minute.

We’re all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn’t let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn’t let us watch ‘The Flintstones’ if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of ‘The Honeymooners’. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old ‘Honeymooners’.

I happen to be lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do as far as a career since I was nine years old.

I’ve had tinnitus for about ten years, and since I started protecting my ears it hasn’t got any worse – touch wood.

It’s fun to do a comedy and hook people in and then hoodwink them into watching a serious movie. I like to lead in with the comedy and then hit them over the head with a drama.

I’m quite sarcastic, and I’m funny, but not kind of funny. It’s a weird funny, and some people don’t get me, and some people do.

Welcome to the MTV Movie Awards I am a bit surprised they asked me to host… and so was MTV. They thought I was Adele.

People will say, ‘Oh, fashion magazines are so bad, they’re giving girls a negative message’-but we’re also the fattest country in the world, so it’s not like we’re all looking at fashion magazines and not eating.

I’m just a public-schoolboy. I’ve got a degree. I’m from a middle-class family in Devon. I’ve got no story.

It’s an idiotic thing that you have to be a college graduate to be an agent.

The sweetest thing a guy said is that I look pretty with or without makeup.