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 hate wasting time.

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

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

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.

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

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

I've still got a twinkle in me.

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 think I'm prone to panic.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I don't think I've aged gracefully.

To rock isn't necessarily to cavort.

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?