“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

First, we must liberate people from religion, as religion is understood and practiced today. Second, we must effect a paradigm shift from religiosity to shared spirituality.

Maybe that’s why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

The well understood equity as well as interest of society demand that we work on much more to prevent crime and offenses than to punish them.

Regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings.

But as far as the parenting lesson, no [I understood that]. To me it was so simple, it was a situation where I disciplined my child and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.

If we all understood we can learn from both older and younger people, then we’d have a better world.

Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

I understood that I might fail, but I wouldn’t let it happen because I changed my compass along the way.