Robert Plant

Because if you do what you think is right for the benefit of everybody and everything and you make decisions, to go back and regret them afterwards-it’s a futile experience and it’s not worth thinking about. Because life just unfolds. Provided you do your best and you think you’re on the right track, you can only be right or wrong. But to regret it-I don’t think there are any huge errors or misdemeanors. You know, I should have hung out with Elvis a bit more.

I can’t tell you an answer to that (question on the meaning of life). I can just say live it, be kind, do your best, don’t hurt anybody, and don’t fake orgasms. From a man’s viewpoint, that’s pretty impossible.

There’s so many parts of your life, you know? People say that you don’t get any better after the age of about forty or something like that, as a performer. I find all that to be a misconception. I don’t feel bad about the way I present stuff. The calendar and the mirror – they’re bastards.

[on accepting his CBE] I owe everything to the musicians I work with. From the UK to Africa to Tennessee, it is their brilliance that I bounce off. Alone I’m nothing.

You know, people can’t fall in love with me just because I’m good at what I do.

No, I’ve never thought that I was gay. And that’s not something you think. It’s something you know.

When I was a question on Jeopardy!, that’s when I felt famous!

[On being told that he should be an agent with him having no acting ‘gifts’. And saying that you need to know absolutely nothing to be an agent.] I thought that’s the job for me.

I don’t know many singers who actually do like the sound of their own voice.

I think the best analogy for where we are right now is that America is Elvis Presley – the most beautiful, talented, rebellious nation in the history of Earth. And now, you’re in your Vegas years. You’ve squeezed yourself into a white jumpsuit, you’re wheezing your way through ‘Love Me Tender’ and you might be about to pass away bloated on the toilet. But you’re still the King.

When onstage, I always try to take my audience through as many emotions as I possibly can. I want them to go from laughter to tears, be shocked and surprised and walk out the door with a renewed sense of themselves – and maybe a smile.

That is not a functional use of language. That is a drunk driver crashing a pickup truck full of alphabet soup.

You don’t just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at ‘SNL’ is writing to go after someone.

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.

We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.

[on Popeye] If you watch it backwards, it has a plot.

Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything.

I was asked to come to Chicago because Chicago is one of our fifty-two states.

I moved to New York last year and I love it. It’s a huge change and I’ve always wanted to spend time there. It’s like a more intense London, and everything’s up a few notches. The lights are brighter, the pace is faster and the food’s better.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

[On roles resembling the title character in ‘Penelope’] I like this girl because she is a bit of a bad-ass. I grew up watching movies with people like Barbara Stanwyck, and sometimes I get frustrated that there aren’t a lot of great female characters out there that young women can look at and go, ‘I want to be like that’. I go to movies and yell at the women on-screen, ‘Shoot him; just shoot him.’ I mean, why why does the guy always have to shoot him?