If you want to be a rock star or just be famous, then run down the street naked, you’ll make the news or something. But if you want music to be your livelihood, then play, play, play and play! And eventually you’ll get to where you want to be.
I think everybody has different priorities in their life. People live their lives differently. People become famous through all sorts of different reasons… some of it through art and some of it through just wanting to be famous. And I think how that all starts tends to reflect how you live your life daily.
Pleasure without God, without the sacred boundaries, will actually leave you emptier than before. And this is biblical truth, this is experiential truth. The loneliest people in the world are amongst the wealthiest and most famous who found no boundaries within which to live. That is a fact I’ve seen again and again.
I think my most famous was ‘Poco’s Legend.’ It’s a white album with a simple line drawing of a horse. It almost has a Picasso feel to it. I remember that Rusty Young, the lead singer of the band, said, ‘I want you to draw a horse for the song ’Legend,’ which is about a phantom spirit horse. I want you to do it in several lines.’
There’s a famous slogan here in the Bavarian dialect, and we use it inside Bayern Munich. We say, ‘Mia san mia.’ Literally, it is, ‘We are we,’ but it means, ‘We are who we are.’ That’s not being very arrogant, but we are very confident about our ability to win the game. It is about a winning mentality.
I knew what I was getting into when I chose golf. Hell, I knew I’d never get rich and famous. All the discrimination, the not being able to play where I deserved and wanted to play – in the end, I didn’t give a damn. I was made for a tough life because I’m a tough man. And in the end, I won: I got a lot of black people playing golf.
Mum worked as a secretary for Orson Welles for what sounded like a very miserable year. Her brother was the actor Jeremy Brett, who became famous for playing Sherlock Holmes. He was an absolutely lovely man. Very exciting and glamorous, he’d always make me feel amazing and full of confidence, like I’d picked the right thing to do in life.
A country that cannot feed itself cannot have self-pride, and in the mid-’60s 20 percent of all the wheat produced in America came into India. We were agriculturally a basket case. And 15 years later, 20 years later, we have become an agricultural power. This is the famous Green Revolution.
America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus’ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.
The name Muhammad is the most common name in the world. In all the countries around the world – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon – there are more Muhammads than anything else. When I joined the Nation of Islam and became a Muslim, they gave me the most famous name because I was the champ.
My high-school coach Tony Reginelli was kind of famous for ‘Reggie-isms,’ kind of like ‘Yogi-isms.’ He always said if you want to be a good quarterback, when sprinting left you want to be amphibious and throw left-handed. I told him, ‘You mean ambidextrous, coach?’
I grew up on my dad’s sets, but I was never star-struck or desperate to be famous. I grew up being a worker. It took me a long time to realise that my work ended up being seen by people. As far as I was concerned, I was just in the family business.
If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.
I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.
The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder – it’s almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking theory of natural selection.
A lot of producers get famous because they decide to be superstars for their own reasons, but I’m inspired by Timbaland and Pharrell and Swizz Beatz ‘cause they’re doing things that are so different. I like how they’re introducing ideas I never would have thought of.
It’s weird to have people so interested in your personal life. It’s a part of the business that grosses me out. I’m always bummed out for people who just happen to be dating a celebrity, and they’re also famous, and they can’t live their life.
Hong Kong might be a small place, but its people make it unique. The iconic images of skyscrapers in this bustling metropolis are famous around the world, but it is the people of Hong Kong, standing up for their city on the streets, who make it truly great.
The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.
Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don’t need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision – a way to be more successful – they have to remain nimble enough to take it.
I worked at a hot dog place, a bagel place, the Jersey Store and the hottest fashion joint around. I was getting too famous to work there anymore. I was almost showing up as a joke. I made $2,000 on my show the previous night and I’m going to go shopping during my five-hour shift.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, ‘He does all these crazy things.’ But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, ‘Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen – impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.’
I don’t want to be famous or recognizable. I don’t want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the Internet… I’ve been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that’s just not something I want.
Of course, ‘I Will Always Love You’ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.
I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.
