“50 percent of the people I perform for have come to scream at me and the other 50 percent have come to listen to the music.”

There are very few things in my life that I can’t have if I want them. So when I see something that I can’t have, immediately I’m obsessed by it.

I also think I could probably repeat the commercial success; whether I want to or not is a different matter. I think there is still better work inside me.

This stuff [marijuana] keeps me sane and happy. I’d say it’s a great drug – but obviously it’s not very healthy.

People, you can never change the way they feel. Better let them do what they will. For they will, if you let them, steal your heart.

I seem to think that anything worth having in life has to be painful to attain.

As I became George professionally and everyone called me George, Yog became the name that people who knew me from before started to use. It became more valuable to me.

I left school at 17 and was a star by the time I was 18 – in certain parts of the world anyway.

I don’t go for safe options. Romantically, I go for people who are a pain in the ass.

[My family] is one of the strongest families you’re ever likely to see.

Change is a stranger you have yet to know.

I think my idea of a perfect romance is when two people really belong to each other.

I just hope that I’ll stay around musically for as long as I can. I love to think that I will still be satisfying myself and other people as a musician until the day I die.

I wouldn’t marry until I was ready to have children.

I’ve done too many stupid things for there not to be movies made about me when I’m dead, so I might as well write the script.

When someone is always going to be there for you. I meet people like that all the time, but I have this unfortunate attraction to people I think I have to fight to become friends with.

I truly believed that tonight would never happen, that I would never sing these songs to you again. But then I’m a fool, which you’ve probably worked out by now.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

Children listen, I’m trying to tell you something good, don’t get caught up in the hood.

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

At Age 11, I used to listen to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection every day

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

God is speaking to all of us, all the time. The question is not, to whom does God talk? The question is, who listens?

Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.