“Everybody is a teenage idol.”

I don’t want to live on past records.

By going solo I could lose a fortune but money is not important.

The Bee Gees no longer exist.

Leaving Australia was the hardest thing I have ever done.

I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs.

I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I’ll just record it there and then.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn’t work out that way if someone else records it

It is commercial pop that the majority of people understand. A working man’s daughter would not understand blues.

You are never really prepared for criticism.

I’ve never been into parties, premieres or night-clubbing

The secret is to make sure your family comes before anything else, because no matter what you do you’ve got to come home.

We enjoy change and freshness, and disco was only one area we’ve delved into.

I’m very much a family person.

When you are in your 20’s and 30’s, you just want a hit record and you don’t really care how it happens

As long as you’re having fun, that’s the key. The moment it becomes a grind, it’s over.

I’m Mr Boring, not a party-goer at all.

You know, when I did ‘American Idol’ the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.

It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.

These days, with ‘American Idol’ and all the other reality shows, young people become famous overnight, and that can be very difficult to handle, the way photographers follow you around and study your every move.

Marlon Brando. The finest actor who ever lived. He was my idol when I was 13. He’s done enough work to last two lifetimes. Everything I do, I think: Can Brando play this with me?

Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol as you wish, but drag her down to your level after that — the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart.

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

I think we’ve made it a golden idol. I think we in the church have treated it differently than we’ve treated anything else.