Robert Plant Quotations

There's nothing worse than a bunch of jaded old farts, and that's a fact.

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

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

Music is for every single person that walks the planet.

I don't know how much more expressive you can get than being a rock and roll singer.

People say that I'm a millionaire, but that's not true - I only spend millions.

Soon, I'm going to need help crossing the street.

I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is.

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.

I like the idea of being alone. I like the idea of often being alone in all aspects of my life. I like to feel lonely. I like to need things.

I'm not a flowerchild or anything like that... whatever it was.

We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal. Does anybody remember laughter?

I've been scared and I've liked not hanging on to stuff where I know that I'm in my comfort zone.

I owe everything to the musicians I work with.

If I didn't do what I do, I wouldn't be as young as I am.

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

It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.

There's no point stepping up to the golden platform if you're going to repeat yourself.

No, I've never thought that I was gay. And that's not something you think. It's something you know.

There's nothing new under the sun - you just get a can of paint out.

Whenever I have bid a hasty goodbye to a loved one, I've always made sure that my record collection was safely stored away in the boot of the car.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

I think we're in a disposable world and 'Stairway to Heaven' is one of the things that hasn't quite been thrown away yet.

You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

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.

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.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

Led Zeppelin has been there through three generations of teenage angst. And there's a generation of kids now who won't know it, post-Linkin Park.

I think that passion and love and pain are all bearable, and they go to make love beautiful.

I'm so aware of the fact that if I hadn't taken the chances that I've taken along the line, I probably wouldn't be getting the best out of my voice anymore, I might have messed it up in that awful, predictable place.

I think I could sing and shear a few sheep at the same time.

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

I think Led Zeppelin must have worn some of the most peculiar clothing that men had ever been seen to wear without cracking a smile.

You have to ask these questions: who pays the piper, and what is valuable in this life?

I'm just lucky because my kids are grown-up - I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don't need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.

I can't moan about any of it. I had a great time in the goldfish bowl.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards.

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

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

The kind of vocal exaggeration that I developed was based on what key songs were in.

I don't want to scream 'Immigrant Song' every night for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure I could.

All over the world, the idea of creating an melange of international musics, it's a very healthy thing.

I've stopped apologizing to myself for having this great period of success and financial acceptance.

It's a two-dimensional gig being a singer, and you can get lost in your own tedium and repetition.

Now I'm a blithering oaf hanging on to the coatsleeves of commerciality.

I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.

There have been people I've warmed to over the years but, as the situation I'm in is so fleeting and transient, I've always known it's going to be over kind of real quick.

People have got to let their bodies breathe a little bit more. That's the great thing about being a pompous, jumped-up rock god. There's plenty of air around you.

When I was a kid, I was following black soul music.

There's a similarity between European and North African folk musics.

A daily blog would just about finish me off completely.

It's not some great work of beauty and love to be a rock-and-roll singer.

I daresay one good concert justifies a week of satisfaction at home.

When you're 20 years old and you're making points with volume and dynamism, it's a fantastic thing to do.

I really had to think and learn about musical intervals.

I still like to get carried away - but passively.

So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice.

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

I've got the big name, but I've always wanted to be in a band, one of a band.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

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

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

There are always generic terms like 'Americana', but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

Crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good, ... When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move. All last night sat on the levee and moaned.

I know that bands that haven't put out a record for 10 years are playing to 20,000 people a night. But that's not the achievement.

I'm very, very pleased to contribute in some form or another,

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn't want to go on!

It's all about, I think, increasing awareness, breaking away from the usual sort of news reel approach to human disasters, if you like; illuminating and exposing these conditions from a different angle.

The whole idea of music, from the beginning of time, was for people to be happy

Music means communication to me. I say 'listen you people out there, listen to my music, let's be one.' Music is a friend to me when I am lonely, when I am blue. You can't define music 'cause music is cosmos and it knows no barrier or definition. You have to feel music to dig it.

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

My mother was a gypsy, and she had a lot of dark blood in her, and her hair was very, very thick - she couldn't even get a brush through it. So I have been very fortunate. And every time I go to cut it off, hairdressers refuse to do it.

You have nothing. One should never allow themselves to think that they have, one can just touch - to have is to lack appreciation, to touch is to want to touch again.

I couldn't imagine anything more horrifying than three middle aged men trying to pretend that 'Black Dog' is still significant. It's inappropriate.

Kashmir is my last resort. I think, if I truly deserve it one day, I should go there and stay there for quite a while. Or if I really need it at any point, it should be my haven, my Shangri-la.

Don't be hard on yourself. And take as many chances, risks, as you can.

As we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our souls.

Does anyone remember laughter?

(`Stairway to Heaven' is) a nice pleasant, well-meaning naive little song, very English. It's not the definitive Led Zeppelin song. `Kashmir' is.

The 50s were great because I collected stamps.

The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?...We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal...I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious...The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.

I want to play tennis and fornicate.

Who wants to see 3 aging old racists on stage, anyway?

Finding another way to do what I know I can do pretty well. A way that stimulates me. I'm always on some sort of learning curve. If I can continually be surprised then I'm alert.

I have no story. My story goes from day to day.

When you're singing we all phrase each other in the most remarkable ways. I might hit some sort of thing I've never done before - some vocal pattern. Bonzo will pick it up - he'll phrase with me instantly and then Pagey may join in or start some other phrase - it's like a quadrant.

Page and I get offered everything: women, little boys, cocaine, the lot, to just go back and do that again. I don't think it would be a good idea at all. [But] I reserve judgment to change my mind in five years' time.

I'm not saving lives. I'm singing and I should go placidly and joyously through the whole thing and work hard and not take it for granted. It's great to have this gift.

There's not a lot of towns that I can go to and take family - too many incongruous knocks on doors - "Hello, honey. Have you missed me?"

I've still got a twinkle in me.

Six months go by very quickly when you're a genius.

Alice Cooper's weirdnesses must really make the kids feel violent. These kids are like my sister, young people of 14 or so who've come to enjoy themselves. So you put things like that in front of them, and I don't think it's right.

I'd break out in hives if I had to sing (`Stairway to Heaven') in every show. I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don't know. It's just not for me. I sang it at the Atlantic Records show because I'm an old softie and it was my way of saying thank you to Atlantic because I've been with them for 20 years. But no more of `Stairway to Heaven' for me.

I was young - I was 20 years old. Now I have the gift of perspective and I feel pretty good about it.

When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do.

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.

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn't want to go on!