Robert Plant quotes:

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 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!

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

How can you consider flower power outdated?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 How could it become outdated?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Music is for every single person that walks the planet.

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.

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.

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

I still like to get carried away - but passively.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

How much do people really want to learn? I mean, some people get into a groove and they stay with it indefinitely. And what starts off as a great moment of explosive passion can end up as cabaret 25, 30 years later. It just depends on whether you go and find the right habitat to extend yourself.

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.

I hate wasting time.

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

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

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

Yeah, I think the point has well and truly sunk in by now, and I can just carry on. I don't even know what I'm looking for except a bit of hilarity and mild insanity musically, and I can get none of that by just delving into the history.

Don't be hard on yourself. And take as many chances, risks, as you can. You've got to be out there adventuring with the voice. Because if you're just a singer for the sake of it, it's not quite enough.

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

I met some people who help in an archeological project in the South Pacific, between sailing to the Marquesas, which is an island group not too far from Tahiti, and I think, Wouldn't that be great? I have such a fascination with history and especially history in my own country.

I'm like one of those firecrackers that goes off in your pocket occasionally. I'm not really struggling with it as much as the people around me. But at least I'm not doing too much damage to anybody or to myself. It's just the condition I'm aware of.

I love the feeling of letting fly, of pushing as far as I could go with my voice. The only way you can really graduate how you do it is by doing it regularly to people who don't have to be super impressed. You can do it in the studio all day long but you don't get the flashback that you get onstage.

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

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

And there are certain songs that are really timepieces and shouldn't be touched. But some of them are a celebration of good humour and sensibility and I think that's okay. I don't care about the past, I'm a musician with ambition.

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.

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

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.

The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.

People run away, pull their hair, go off in different directions, nodding their heads and going, "Oh, God." I am slightly disheveled, I think. I'm really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician, at least.

I've still got a twinkle in me.

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.

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Life isn't moving quickly; time moves very quickly. But I don't really have a schedule now that's very challenging. I make the calls and I call the shots, so I feel reasonably centered. Sometimes, I wonder whether or not it's even necessary to do concerts and stuff.

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

Dolly Parton's done 'Stairway to Heaven.' Anything's possible.

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.

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

Each album has a different atmosphere. The third album and Houses of the Holy seem to be the two albums that people didn't get off on quite as strongly as the other ones. But I think they contain the basic ingredients for the further pursuance of what we're doing... the turning point to relieve the tedium of repetition.

I do spend a lot more time away from the U.K., it's important to me that I still feel the beat of the people that have been close to me for a long, long time. It's also important that I have really strong and beautiful relationships which I wish to preserve. That enables me - or challenges me, ultimately - to get a Texas driving license!

I kind of disguise my limitations by hanging out with very talented people. The excitement of the collision between the microphone-twirling guy from 1966 to now is just a fantastic adventure. There aren't many of us left and I've managed to kind of cover my tracks pretty good.

You know sometimes words have two meanings.

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

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

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.

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

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 really had to think and learn about musical intervals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

My dad played fiddle as well.

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

I don't think I've aged gracefully.

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

[Elvis] 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.

A daily blog would just about finish me off completely.

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.

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

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

Austin - it's a stimulating center. In this conversation, the very first two questions were talking about my kind of wanderlust and my adventures. Some people at my time in life travel forever. I don't know whether it's the British or the Australians - whoever it is, you can kind of stagger into some sort of far-off bastion in the middle of nowhere, and you'll find someone from Britain or someone from Australia or maybe an American.

Back in my day, we called it rock 'n' roll, but then we always reminded listeners that it was no big deal if they didn't like it.

Being good isn't just about being dextrous and being flash. Being good is about being an all-round contributor in the great world of music.

Boredom is a horrible thing.

Boredom is the beginning of all destruction and everything that is negative.

Circumspection is not one of my better, favorite conditions, really.

Come into my life, here where nothing matters. Come into my life, roll away the gloom.

Does anyone remember laughter?

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

Each album comes from definitely a different period in the evolution of each of us individually as creators and the role that we take in life. The external stimuli changed... so the songs are full of lots of different meanings.

Every place is determined by the characters who are there.

Everybody's got something to tell you. And most people have told me to do the obvious thing as far as my career goes. Which would have sent me tottering into the abyss.

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 absolutely adore and idolise 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.

I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things Ive been through are serious.

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

I can't regret until the end. And I won't regret then, either.

I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I've lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity, which I try to avoid. Austin is a great sort of stepping-off point, if you like. I'm from a temperate climate.

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

I don't see what the point is in growing up.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

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... and I'm really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I've been involved with.

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

I haven't lost my innocence particularly. I'm always ready to pretend I haven't. Yeah, it is a shame in a way.

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 like to make my voice sound like a piece of tin that's been stuck on the side of a chair, lifted up as far as it would go and then let to spring - "doooiiinng." I like to make it into a piece of metal from time to time and I can do it, both with the movements in my throat and with, uh, my little toys... So I like to take it beyond just a voice, more into the realms of a weapon.

I listen to the crowds [laughs]... I like Blind Melon very much.

I live with the people I've always lived with. I'm quite content.

I may as well do everything as if it's brand new, and if I start to feel that any of it's a compromise, then I'll...I'll be in Wisconsin.

I met Jason Donovan at RAK studios. He had jodphurs on and small riding boots as he jumped out of the cab. He looked just like me!

I owe everything to the musicians I work with.

I put a lot of work into my lyrics. Not all my stuff is meant to be scrutinized, though.

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

I think I surprise myself.

I think I'm prone to panic.