“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.”

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

Fame attracts lunatics.

You don’t know being a performer what kind of performance you’re going to give. You know you can give a certain quality of performance, but as I grow older I’m much more content in my own skin because when I come offstage, I have a balance in my life.

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

You should never take more than you give.

We live in an age, in an era where there is so much negativity, there is so much violence in the world, there is so much unrest and people are at war, that I wanted to promote the word love and red signifies love.

I’ve always wanted to smash a guitar over someone’s head. You just can’t do that with a piano.

I have an optimistic view of everything. You have to, otherwise you’d go nuts.

Like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to until the rain set it.

Sometimes when I’m flying over the Alps I think, ‘that’s like all the cocaine I sniffed.’

There’s a time for everyone, If they only learn, that the twisting kaleidoscope moves us all in turn.

You and your oven are capable of great things,Remember, no two ovens are the same.

Drunk all the time, feeling fine on elderberry wine.

I had no balance in my life. I was this one person onstage and this person offstage, who really didn’t know much about living.

I used to take hostages in my relationships and not let people be independent. It always ended in disaster, because you take away people’s identity and they end up full of resentment.

I am the most well-known homosexual in the world.

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