Robert Plant

You feel quite distant by playing at huge stadiums year after year, where you only can see a great darkness in front of you

Lately, I’m spending more and more time working with non-rock musicians and leaving the mainstream – almost dissolving into another world, musically.

All I can say is that it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re young and foolish.

No matter what we say, entertainers are usually quite insecure, wobbly characters underneath, and maybe that bit of glory or that bit of expression or whatever it is compensates in some area.

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.

The events between 1968 and 1980 were the kind of cornerstone for everything I’ve been able to do, they gave me the springboard.

I’m competitive with anyone who writes a good song – I don’t care if it’s a band or solo artist or whoever.

You’d be surprised how much fun you start to have once ya stop giving A f**k.

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

I can’t believe Tina Turner actually was on the same stage. I can’t believe I set foot on the same stage, and it’s going to be an album, people are going to buy it, and it’s going to be a video.

I also went to art school and learned to play a piano there, but I play by ear.

I believe I could do dance on ice, or play in a musical of Freud’s life called ‘It’s Your Mother’ – or maybe one for the symbolists: ‘Jung at Heart’. There’s always the one about India: ‘The Gandhi Man Can’.

I knew I had to make a sacrifice to do what I’ve always wanted to do.

I want to work with great directors and try not to put too much pressure on myself and just read things for the story and recognize when I’m drawn to something for the right reasons and try to maintain some sanity.

I am sarcastic and dry, but I also have a pretty huge zest for life.

I have standards I don’t plan on lowering for anybody, including myself.

Does anyone remember laughter?

Do the NBC bigheads really pay attention to these message boards? Um, I don’t know if they read the message boards. I hope so, because I write fifty to a thousand fake posts a week, mostly, uh, saying that I’m really good and that no else is as good as me. So, I hope they listen to that because I’m trying to get a raise.

Oh but I’m serious this time. Take your American history books, burn them in the streets, they’re worthless after Tuesday. Why? The senate is up for grabs. I repeat – the f**king senate is up for grabs!

It’s strange, somebody asked for my autograph the other day. Because I finished school and I’m not really doing anything at the moment, I was just kind of aimlessly wandering around London and these two guys who were about 30 came up and asked for my autograph. I was really quite proud at the time, and they wanted to take photos and stuff. And then they were sort of wandering around and I was kind of wandering around and I bumped into them about three times, and every single time their respect for me kept growing and growing and growing.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open. The crowd cheers.