“It’s very important to have two tiaras when you’re on the road. You never know when you’ll be invited to something really formal.”

As a child, as a teenager, I was kind of not allowed to wear fashionable clothes.

Bands today have to learn their craft by putting the hard work in that we did when we were young performers.

That’s just a part of being an artist: you can’t write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you’d be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

I really appreciate my performing so much better, as I get older. I don’t take it for granted anymore. I really relish it and love it.

My mantra is if you raise money, don’t waste it.

What a scandal, if I die. Yeah, I’m gonna kill myself, get a little headline news.

It seems to me, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything.

Unless you show off you’re not going to get noticed.

Talk to each other. Never go to bed when you’re angry with each other. Lady Antonia Frasier who was married to Harold Pinter said they never went to bed on an argument.

I’m a juvenile product of the working class, who’s best friend floats in the bottom of a glass.

I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.

I never thought of myself as being handsome or good-looking or whatever.

The worst thing you can do to a child, and I’ve seen it happen so many times, is the silver spoon.

Love is the key we must turn, truth is the flame we must burn.

I had to learn how to function as a human being. And I really enjoyed that process.

My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father’s brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’

Meeting people formally is like viewing a house without going inside.

Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue too.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

I’ve never been a big believer in formal education.

In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being