Just once I would like to persuade the audience not to wear any article of blue denim. If only they could see themselves in a pair of brown corduroys like mine instead of this awful, boring blue denim.

It's only the giving that makes you what you are.

A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.

If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim.

I can never make up my mind if I'm happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton.

Just once I would like to persuade the audience not to wear any article of blue denim. If only they could see themselves in a pair of brown corduroys like mine instead of this awful, boring blue denim.

Seek that which within lies waiting to begin the fight of your life that is everyday.

All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

As a musician, life is not over just because you are getting older, and so I find retirement a very frightening and dark thought.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

I make up my own mind in light of available facts, with my own experience and a sense of personal ethics.

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.

I think I've owned all the models of iPods so far. And these days between my iPod, iPhone and my personal laptop computer, I'm someone who is very, very grateful for all the ways to listen to music and completely switch off from people around me and listen to the music in detail, which is very hard to do if you're in a room with other people.

I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.

I think we always view people who make us feel uncomfortable and appear to intrude on our middle-class cozy space, we view them with, if not hostility, at least suspicion, discomfort, embarrassment.

I was always more interested in the ultimate live performance rather than the recording for its own sake. And, for the audience too, that thrill of - just being there.

I was not a great guitarist, so I sold my 1960 Fender Stratocaster in exchange for a Shure Microphone, made in Chicago, and a flute.

I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could've gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts.

I'm all in favor of banks that play their part in community endeavors, private individuals looking for loans, people who want to start up a little business, and that's what banks are for.

I'm really terrible with small children; they're small, noisy, irritating, damp and soggy.

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.

In most cases, my favorite Jethro Tull songs will be determined by how I feel about them as live performance songs, not by the recorded identity.

Prog didn't really go away. Just took a catnap in the late Seventies. A new generation of fans discovered it, and a whole new array of bands and solo artists took it on into the new millennium.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame traditionally has had a management style that is very supportive of American talent, first and foremost, over everything else. And I think that's right and proper.

The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.

There's always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It's how you lend some authority to what you write - you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little.

We do hear perhaps too many accolades generally aimed at people like Steve Jobs. We have to remember that there are other classic things in life that we undervalue and take them for granted. If you think of the classic lines of the modern jet aircraft, it's really been there since early World War II.

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

When I was in my teenage years, I went to sign up as a cadet entrant to the police force but was at the very last moment rejected, just as I was about to sign my name on the dotted line. I won't get into why that happened, but it was a moment where it could've been predetermined then that I was off to become a policeman.

Cafe society is as old as the hills. Starbucks and its imitators are the coffee face of the new man in a hurry.

The flute is an instrument that doesn't lend itself very readily to rock music. It's a gentle and sensitive instrument. To make it work at rock 'n roll levels, you really have to push it pretty hard.

Our politicians may fail us, but Status Quo always delivers on the promise.

I realized early on that it was important to have those values, a morality and ethics that come with being southern girl. The way you treat people, little things, the niceties like hellos, like courtesy. They mean something.

This is something I've always wanted to do- to skate through a part of New York City that thousands of people ride through every week, feeling the energy of one of the original stomping grounds of street skating.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Most people assume that once security software is installed, they're protected. This isn't the case. It's critical that companies be proactive in thinking about security on a long-term basis.

No economy can succeed without a high-quality workforce, particularly in an age of globalization and technical change.

Emerging markets are hugely important.

I almost always do things that I like, in some form or fashion. Every once in awhile that means that I don't think the script is any good and I don't have any trust in the people, but the film is shooting in Sri Lanka, or somewhere like that, so I'm going.

Decisions become easier when your will to please God outweighs your will to please the world.

I'm surprised that we've gotten to a point where we don't put our country first and put our party first.

Kids are no fools: they're very sophisticated, they don't miss a lot; they don't miss nuance.

Well, we've made some changes on this tour. We're no longer sleeping in the parking lots and swimming in the fountains. We've been staying in hotels most of the way, though I will say some hotels have declined to take us because we're just having too much fun.

First of all, the American people are inundated with advertisement after advertisement of you buy, buy, buy. You've got to have the latest thing. The iPad 1 isn't any good anymore, you've got to have the iPad 2. The iPhone 4, now you've got to have iPhone 4S. Now you've got to have the 5b, now you've got to have the 6c.

Lebanon will be engulfed again in a huge power game that will last quite a long time. This is the tragic destiny of Lebanon.

It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

Everybody's got haters, but your city's always behind you. It's only right to give back.

As has been pointed out with Libya, the debate over Libya, sometimes we allow diplomatic relations with imperfect regimes because progress can best be made through engagement instead of isolation.