When I'm onstage they know I'm honest, and I try to be as humble as I can.

Dancing, apart to music with a beat, is my legacy.

I'm just grateful to be on this planet. I have no enemies that I know of. I'm just the guy who makes happy.

My outlet is my music, and it's been this way since I was 4 years old.

What turns me on is to walk into a sold-out venue. The audiences are so much the same as they were in the '60s. It's just an amazing thing. I can't explain it, but I hope it never stops.

It takes a real soldier to stay in the music industry and live off the things that have been put before me and be able to survive all this time because it has not been easy.

I want my flowers while I'm alive.

God's got something for me. I have faith it'll be OK.

Do you realize that I have had five albums in the Top 30. Elvis and The Beatles have never done that. I had five singles in the Top 5, I mean, no one's ever done that.

When I'm onstage they know I'm honest, and I try to be as humble as I can.

Before I got in this business I was in the chicken business.

Everybody in the '80s, well, we hate rap. Now, the biggest rapper in the world... Eminem. Rap's a black thing.

Besides, at 62 years old I look like I'm about 27.

Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears all the rappers, they're doing my dances and they're making billions doing my dances. When they do that little thing they do with their hands that's The Fly and The Pony.

I compare the Twist to the electric light, The Twist is me, and I'm it. I'm the electric light.

I want people to look at a checkerboard and think of me!

Homey don't quit. What else are you gonna do? It's like those guys in the cartoon they get up in the morning, check the clock and fight all day and after it's over they check the clock and go home. That's how it goes.

Ever see a little kid walking around talking to himself? I'm the same way.

The public doesn't mind people living together without being married, providing they don't overdo it.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

Foot work, hand-eye coordination. There's a lot of things. If you just watch basketball, you can tell where it would help someone who's receiving the ball.

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story.

Being able to breathe underwater would be sweet. There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about. I would love to check out the bottom of the ocean to see what's going on down there.

It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman.

Young people are often asked, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' and given advice about how to lead meaningful adult lives, but where's the encouragement to lead meaningful lives right now?

It was the roughest time in my life. Connie helped me through it.

I really appreciate the many neighbourhoods of Berkeley. There is still the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. And it has the University of California, which is the greatest gift, to my mind, to be close to it. It keeps the place alive.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

I don't seek the counsel of God. God doesn't speak to me on what I should or shouldn't do.

Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.

Honestly, I'm not a massive fan of courtroom dramas.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

If youre comparing the badness of two words and you wont even say one of them the n word thats the worse word.

He will be beginning a brand new chapter in the Michael Jackson legend.

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.

As soon as you pick up a guitar, you're up against the legends of rock. The same goes with stadium drum kits and electric bass. Essentially, you're already in a soundscape that's very familiar and has a lot of established legendary material recorded using those instruments.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.