“What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.”

But once I saw them [Jackson 5 during audition], I rushed out with my video camera to start taping them because I knew that they were something so special, mainly because of the lead singer, nine-year-old Michael Jackson. And it was just so obvious to me that he was a star.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood – if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these – if they get the right ones, they’re lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they’re unlucky.

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn’t know they had.

Motown was about music for all people – white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

The world has to change to fit you. And if you stick to your principles, values and morals long enough, it will.

His [Michael Jackson] behavior was weird, but when you get an artist and a genius, many of the geniuses throughout our whole history were weird. And they did weird things because none of us could understand what was on their mind and why they did what they did.

Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car.

I didn’t want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

Money had never been the main thing for me. It’s the legacy that was important.

I’m a songwriter, that’s what I love.

Don’t judge yourself by others’ standards…have your own. And don’t get caught up into the trap of changing yourself to fit the world.

Today’s business climate is not for me.

I’ve discovered that Motown and Broadway have a lot in common – a family of wonderfully talented, passionate, hardworking young people, fiercely competitive but also full of love and appreciation for the work, for each other and for the people in the audience.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other … and if we admit this medium as an hypothesis.

Tolerance is only another name for indifference.

You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.