Robert Plant

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

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 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.

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.

My vocal style I haven’t tried to copy from anyone. It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.

It may become Bob as time goes on. My dad was a Bob and his father was a Bob. That seems to be the sort of cheery thing that you do to octogenarians, but not yet, no.

There’s not much room for eccentricity in Hollywood, and eccentricity is what’s sexy in people.

See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.

Old men do it better. We’re not so sensitive in certain areas.

If you are someone, you know, with fame, whatever amount, it’s good to be married to someone who’s not impressed with that at all.

I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don’t know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it’s kind of stuck with me.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

[On relationship with Jimmy Page] We’re still good friends, we both enjoy a rather dark sense of humour that comes, I think, from being on the wrong side of the tracks for all those wild years.

I think mystery is kind of great. I don’t know anything about Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Ava Gardner – not really – and I like that. I love watching their movies because they’re my personal movie stars. I don’t know what they eat and who their trainer is.

I think if Keith Moon was here today and you asked him to recall most of his early life or most of his life, he wouldn’t be able to recall it.

My husband said it was him or the cat. I miss him sometimes.

I guess you have to be really open to your acting partners and believe in the story.

If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!

Everything I do stems from something personal, not just because it will look good on paper or be a tax write-off.

I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will live as one.