Robert Plant Quotes

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

I think we're a band with a lot of history now so it's nice to come up with something that doesn't have any history at all.

I think if you try to tailor your act to anybody, you end up with an act that doesn't work anyway.

It's time for second chances. It's time to remake the world.

...New Beginning to the same old story

Fleetwood Mac has been pretty truthful. Open about what we do. We've always done it from the inside out. Versus being pressured from the outside and changing the inside. And that's our story.

It was actually nice to get a fresh, clean slate when I came to America.

I think the moment you start trying to please a fan base is when you start going downhill. I'm going to always, always write about what I want, even if it doesn't necessarily cater to most of them.

I'd much rather fail than do something like 'The Chorus Line' movie, sanitized and Hollywoodized.

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that.

All the power to them but I'm not interested in making yet another show that looks like some other show.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The first advice I have to give the party is that it should clean its slate.

It's good to please the network, but you really just have to tell the stories you want to tell, and if you try to please other people, it ends up starting to water stuff down. Those decisions we have to make are hard, but we usually just err on the side of 'What would we want to see?'

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

Dropping the exclamation point was our way of drawing a line in the sand. We have a new record and we feel like a new band. We were all tired of it, and we went ahead and got rid of it.

If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that's less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.

I think that's part of the battle of defining yourself as an artist. You're constantly fighting the pressure from outside to be pigeonholed and deliver more of what people already liked.

Being in somebody else's thing and saying their words and not having any right to change it - I don't know how I'd deal with that. I'd like to think I could do it, but I just know I've got a dead particular taste.

I know, if I would have won 'X-Factor' and if I would have continued in that lane, I would have spiraled out of control. Performing on there was good, but it wasn't me. It was me compromising for the judges, just different people around.

My biggest thing is that I never want to sell out. Or be a sellout.

You can filter certain stuff - it depends what artist you are - but you're never going to be true to yourself if you're worried about what other people think.