Robert Plant

I absolutely adore and idolize women. All women. I think they are all amazing. The female musicians I’ve met have been far more inspiring than the male ones. Women tend to be much more creative and ambitious. I think I may have been a woman in a past life.

Well, my sort of stability as a character, it’s never been one of my strongest attributes. I’m a bit of a clusterf*ck. I get so many great ideas that I kind of mesmerize people with another plan before the previous plan is hatched out; people run away, pull their hair off, go off in different directions, nodding their heads, and going, “Oh, god”.

Really, life is life. You do a lot of different things and you have great adventures but there’s not a lot to talk about unless you’re in the middle of an adventure at the time. Circumspection is not one of my better, favorite conditions, really.

A song is a song, you know? First of all comes a song, second of all comes the way it’s promoted … where you place it and what happens to it and how it gets streamed and all that sort of thing is in the lap of the gods, and maybe artists in the end just take a back seat and let it roll.

I’m always eager to return to the hospitality of the Southern states….Towns and cities that hold fond memories for me personally, places that gave birth to so much of the music I love.

There are some people in here who are not journalists. There’s a masseuse in here who’s not a journalist – I think that’s ever so exciting.

Nudity for fictional characters is as normal and mundane as eating breakfast. What bothers me is our culture’s obsession with nudity. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. I think this overemphasis with nudity makes actors nervous. There’s the worry about seeing one’s body dissected, misrepresented, played and replayed on YouTube.

[On Lou Adler] Lou really had a production deal called a label, whereas we had a real label. We had a great many artists, whereas he had very few. Lou also produced most of the stuff that came out on Ode. We were not producers.

[on choosing films she will be in] I have a weird process, but the main thing is like this: I hear her voice in my head. There are a lot of wonderful scripts my agents can’t believe I pass on, but I do because I can’t hear the voice. It doesn’t appeal to me then. I’m really careful. Unless I hear the voice, I can’t do it.

I love the people here. I love New York.

I was a mostly happy child, though I had a pretty rough puberty. Growing up as a girl is always traumatizing, especially when you have the deadly combination of greasy skin and getting your boobs at ten. But I think it’s good to grow up that way. It builds character.

They put all this money into these huge movies, and then no one goes to see them… That sort of shows that they’re out of touch. Then, everyone in town passes on my little movie, and it does really well.

Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn’t allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected to a three-person U.N. commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.

Being such a big band is never a problem but it can be distracting.

When it’s your chance to step up to the plate, just hit it out of the park, and everybody will forget about everything that came before.

I find Hollywood really toxic.

D.C. went under federal control in 1801 and it wasn’t until the 1960s that D.C.’s then three quarters of a million citizens, mostly African American, were given even the most basic electoral rights … With that level of restriction the mayor of D.C. gets to run the city the way a school council president gets to run her high school.

Even in 2008 – which was probably the most exciting political cycle I experienced while at SNL – there was a sense of a hangover afterwards. But this time, it has been relentless, and we’re only relentless in what we’re doing because [the Trump administration is] so relentless in what they’re doing. So this is all a reactive relentlessness.

British politics, when done well, can be very fun. John Oliver

I was making guitars and I was a sheet metal worker and if you ever see sheet metal workers’ hands, you’ve never seen so many cuts in your life.