Brian McKnight

I don’t care how small the game. I want to win.

I didn’t think my career would last this long, and it’s still going.

You can’t listen to what people who aren’t musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don’t want to hear, ‘Your kid is ugly.’ But I knew the record was good and it would sell.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

It is great to have your own label; you can cultivate your own artists… I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to.

I hate that the paparazzi agencies get all of the fan accounts shut down! Ugh we have to think of something! Maybe start our own agency? And let all of the fans post whatever tf they want!!!!!

I’ve gotten to a point with fashion where I just don’t care. I wear and I do what I want because I like it, because I am confident in it, because it makes me feel good. That’s the only way you can do it.

My career has been a combination of hard work and timing. Working with Stevie Wonder at the Kennedy Center Honors was timing. The Tonight Show was timing. Carnegie Hall, that was timing. My marriage was timing. I was ready, I wanted to know what it was like.

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.

If you have physical attractiveness you don’t have to act.

I’m a weirdo. I don’t leave the house unless I have to.

You know what, I have faith in people. I think people want to see something new and different. They don’t want to see anything that they’ve seen before. They don’t want to have it worked out in the first 10 minutes how it will end. I think people are really smart and sophisticated.

You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to f**k it.

Dammit, interviews are not what I do.

[on her parents] They’re very harsh critics and they’ve often said to me: “That was shit, you were crap’, but this is the first time (after he saw her as “Amy Foster” on Swept from the Sea) my father said to me: ‘I think one day you’ll be a good actress”!

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

[On Lord Of The Rings] I don’t like all this stupid Gollum begat Wobblo and the Oompa Loompas and…Oh Jesus Christ! There was too much “Oh, God, here come the gloodloys…” Christ Almighty, what are they talking about!?

I have my moments – usually twice every album – when I basically lose it.

Finding a good bus driver can be as important as finding a good musician.

I’ve just got to get that album out. I have to get it out, if it’s the last thing I do.