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

Presley was definitely a great inspiration to every guy who ever had a hard-on in the whole of the Western world, I should think. He shook everybody well and true, and we just kept on shakin’. But he started it.

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

I still like to get carried away – but passively.

Possibly the whole creative whirlwind of any musician’s life is based on garnering and developing and absorbing more and more experience.

You can’t even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.

I decided I am not going to say things I do not mean anymore.

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.

There’s no damn business like show business – you have to smile to keep from throwing up.

So many people try to grow up too fast, and it’s not fun! You should stay a kid as long as possible!

But with the right kind of coaching and determination you can accomplish anything and the biggest accomplishment that I feel I got from the film was overcoming that fear.

The same kind of boys always like me. The ones that easily get their feelings hurt. Ugh! Then they try to get my attention by doing something dumb but I’m too busy to notice

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

Well, I think you and I have always felt the same way – that we’re Jewish but we can get away with just being exotic. We’re kind of Jews in disguise.

Being a Southern person and a blonde, it’s not a good combination. Immediately, when people meet you, they think of you as not being smart.

The women’s movement hasn’t changed my sex life. It wouldn’t dare.

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

Twelve was a real turning point for me as I moved to a mixed school, and then I became cool and discovered hair gel.

This is between us! You know this is the best thing for the company.

I’m quite obviously not the world’s most handsome man – I’m the second world’s most handsome man!

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.