There were times when I blundered and got the dreaded look from the lads. But that was a good sign. It showed I'd attempted something I'd not tried before.

There was absolutely no intention of splitting up. We had so many great ideas to use on the new album. John Paul Jones was incredible, coming to the studio each day with new instruments to play.

Drumming was the only thing I was ever good at.

If we'd have said we were not upset, they would have thought we were so rich it meant nothing to us, and if we say we're upset about it, they'll say money is all we care about.

Not everybody likes or understands a drum solo, so I like to bring in effects and sounds to keep their interest.

My nerves before a gig got worse; I had terrible bad nerves all the time. Once we started... I was fine.

We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.

Sometimes you'd come up against a brick wall... or sometimes you go into a fill and you'd know halfway through it was going to be disastrous.

There were times when I blundered and got the dreaded look from the lads. But that was a good sign. It showed I'd attempted something I'd not tried before.

I hate it when people slag us off. We had done three tours during 1970 and we finished off feeling we had just about had enough. We had done so much in that short space of time, we were drained.

I dare not drink before a gig because I'll get tired and blow it. So I have to sit drinking tea in a caravan.

I remember in the early days when we played six nights a week for a month and I was doing my long drum solo every night. My hands were covered in blisters.

We once did six tours of America in 15 months.

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

People who don't take care of their drums really annoy me.

A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.

I don't read as much as people may expect. In fact, sometimes I feel that I should probably read more, but then I do believe that one of the big problems of our times is that there's too much reading and not enough thinking.

Some stresses are unavoidable - it's just part of life. One of the things I do to avoid stress is not work with people that I don't really like or drive me crazy.

I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!

At this point I've got a bit of a track record. So people realize that when 'Weird Al' wants to go parody, it's not meant to make them look bad... it's meant to be a tribute.

The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams.

We never try and reinvent the past. We try to look forward to whats going on ... We dont have a set plan you might have ideas or a different set pieces you might use to put inside your puzzle but its like you always have to look forward to whats beyond from where you just came from.

I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make sense of them. I'm more worried that I'm going to die before I've had time.

Fiscal responsibility and government reform are going to be good themes for governing, well at any time, but particularly coming out of a recovery.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

Such mistress, such Nan,Such master, such man.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

The ultimate promise of technology is to make us master of a world that we command by the push of a button.

One thing I know in baseball is you should never be comfortable where you are. It doesn't matter who you are. It's a business. If I got traded tomorrow, no hard feelings; it's a business.

Even on a personal note, my dressing table downstairs is crowded with things, like a mini landscape. It's a city with buildings and towers and roads. There's a pool and a little park. When I move something around it becomes a different tableau.

When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.

New York has always had a love for Southern artists. There's no place else that makes me feel like the city does. I just love the immediate nature of the city, you can get whatever you want whenever you want it and do whatever you want whenever you want to.

The band we have now on stage is the band I always wanted to be in.

Between 1995 and 2009, Western Europe's entrepreneurs created jobs faster than the U.S. did, and European economies exported more than the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Eastern Europe's productivity increased more rapidly than East Asia's.

'Red Knot' is a film that I shot in Antarctica almost three years ago on a boat. It was a film that was improvised and it had very interesting circumstances while making the film, obviously. We were on a small boat bobbing around in Antarctica. It was a really remarkable experience.

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

Slowly, ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions.

In life the only thing that you can expect is the unexpected; the only surprise is a day that has none.

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.