Elton John Quotes (Best Sayings & Song Quotes)

I never thought of myself as being handsome or good-looking or whatever. I always felt like an outsider.

I have a much better relationship with the press than I did, I think because I stood my ground.

Johnny, can't you come out to play in your empty garden?

The worst thing you can do to a child, and I've seen it happen so many times, is the silver spoon.

And I'm afraid, in this day and age, trust, which I count so, you know, I love loyalty. I love trust.

I'm addicted to working. I mean, I have a list of 100 countries I want to play in. I'm basically killing myself by travelling so much, for no reason whatsoever.

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians.

There is nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of your own sex.

As Elton John, my days on pop radio are over, and I know that and I accept it and I'm not unhappy about it.

I love drag queens and I love going to see them perform because those people have got so much character and bravery. Such balls! I love people with balls.

When I say I don't have to write pop songs anymore, there's no way I'm going to get on the radio at 60 years of age unless I'm doing a duet with Gaga or I was on 'All of the Lights,' which was a Kanye West record that managed to get on the radio.

The less I say the more my work gets done.

Well, I was making a record, and I had to choose a name, because they said, you know, you can't make a record under the name of Reg Dwight, because it's never going to - you know, it's not attractive enough.

I have a lot of money stashed away, but I do live my life from day to day.

I didn't have sex until I was 23 and that was with a man. I made up for lost time after that in a hurry. I wish I could have had sex when I was, like, 14, 15 or 16 because that's such an exciting age to have sex.

And I agreed with that, and I couldn't wait to change my name anyway, because I'm not too fond of the name of Reginald. It's a very kind of '50s English name.

There's a time for everyone, If they only learn, that the twisting kaleidoscope moves us all in turn.

When your persona begins to take over your music and becomes more important, you enter a dangerous place. Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

I tour as many countries as possible, and I've toured every state in America, plus every province in Canada.

I'm not everybody's cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I'm a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don't like it, fair enough. But give me a break.

I'm very generous.

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.

I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.

I mean, Sting is one of my great buddies and I love him to death.

And I trusted someone to look after me on the business side of life.

I've always wanted to smash a guitar over someone's head. You just can't do that with a piano.

I'm a very wealthy man.

I could never go onstage in denims.

But you know, I have a pretty good relationship with the press and the paparazzi. It's just when they step over the line that, you know, enough's enough.

I'm a great lover of children. I never thought that one day I'd actually be a father, but I'm very pleased that I changed my mind. Children are extremely important. They are the future of the world.

The great thing about small children is they're portable, so we take them everywhere, but when it comes to 2015, Zachary's going to school, and I want to be there to drop him off and pick him up. I don't want to just be the father who reads them a bedtime story.

Everything I thought I'd hate about having children - the crying, the screaming - nothing fazes me. I love it all, and it's relaxed me.

Fame attracts lunatics.

I'd always lived with people - my family, or had people living with me, because I'd never liked being on my own.

Well, I've had my fair share in Britain of battling the tabloids.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

You can cage the songbird, but you can't make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you'll have to clip her wings.

I've always been dead set against festivals - really suspicious and wary.

I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens. I can not bear gardening, but I love gardens.

Welcome to the world of bullshit, my dear. You have arrived.

Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel.

I just go into the studio, look at the lyrics for the first time when I put them on the piano, and go. If I haven't got it within 40 minutes, I give up. It's never changed, the thrill has never gone, because I don't know what I'm going to get next.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me.

I've got a great collection of photography.

I do like my rock stars to be a little larger than life. I don't mind the earnest ones at all, but I do like a bit of individuality.

We live in an age, in an era where there is so much negativity, there is so much violence in the world, there is so much unrest and people are at war, that I wanted to promote the word love and red signifies love.

I grew up at my grandmother's house and she had a beautiful garden. I used to hate mowing the lawn and weeding, which is what you do when you're a kid.

There's no pressure for me to go out there and say, I've got to have a top 40 hit because it's not going to happen.

People with HIV are still stigmatized. The infection rates are going up. People are dying. The political response is appalling. The sadness of it, the waste.

At heart I've always been a music fan. That part of me has never changed since I was a little kid, sitting in a room watching a record go round, looking at the colour of the labels.

I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people. Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. But there are so many Christian people I know who are gay and love their religion.

I am the most well-known homosexual in the world.

I think people should be free to engage in any sexual practices they choose; they should draw the line at goats, though.

If there is a better singer in England than Craig David, then I am Margaret Thatcher.

That's just a part of being an artist: you can't write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you'd be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

Well, as I was saying... everyone's so nice to me, usually.

I've only been interested in the artistic side of life.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

Because, I figured that, because I was a successful man, I was wealthy, I was, you know, seemingly intelligent - even that I am not intelligent enough to ask for help.

I grew up conservative because my mum was a conservative, and when I finally realized what conservatives were, I changed my mind immediately.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything. Songs will outlast the artist and they will go on for ever if they are good.

I'm so proud to be on a Kate Bush record; she's always marched to the beat of her own drum.

Simon Cowell and I are great friends, and we wind each other up. Rod Stewart and I do the same thing.

Sometimes when I’m flying over the Alps I think, 'that’s like all the cocaine I sniffed.'

Ever since I had that interview in which I said I was bisexual it seems twice as many people wave at me in the streets.

The thing about Vegas is, I don't have to fly anywhere, and that really helps. It means I stay in one place for three weeks at a time instead of flying backwards and forwards.

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

And there's no guarantee that if you get HIV and you take these triple therapies, or whatever comes along next, that they're going to be successful for you.

Live for each second without hesitation

My mum always used to buy a record every Friday.

Don't judge the picture by the frame, every man is not the same

I'm going to fight for human rights, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or vocally so that I get locked up. I can't just sit back; it's not in my nature. I can't sit back and blindly ignore it, and I won't.

I never really made a full album in Los Angeles before.

I loathe celebrity. I can't stand it.

And I talked to my doctor, and I must admit, you know, I'm sometimes quite renowned for my outbursts and I was just very frustrated, maybe a little frightened.

I am such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.

We can't keep thinking of gay people as being ostracised; we can't keep thinking of Muslim people as being ostracised because of the fundamentalism that occurs in Islam. Muslim people have to do something about speaking up about it. We can't judge a book by its cover.

If I was to say what I am, I'd be a Labour man. I like Tony Blair a lot, I think he's a good man. And in America I'd definitely be a Democrat; I'd never be a Republican.

The great thing about rock and roll is that someone like me can be a star.

Once I'd heard 'Modern Times' by Bob Dylan, it really changed the way I wanted to make records.

I am totally against the war but violence is part of mankind and it's going to happen, but as musicians I think we've got to step up and say 'come on'.

Instead of more violence why isn't there a meeting of religious leaders. It's all got to be dialogue - that's the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say 'Listen, this can't go on. Why do we have all this hatred?'

I do like Britney Spears. I think she's cute. I think she's fun. And I like her records. You know, I'm not a pop snob whatsoever. I think she makes great pop records.

How wonderful life is while you're in the world

I've got that resilient thing inside me. But I wasn't a happy bunny.

I am so in the past. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.

It's the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, 'till we find our place, on the path unwinding.

I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way.

I've never been jealous of anybody's success. I've been flummoxed by it because I don't understand it, but I'm not jealous of it.

I'm very relaxed. I have a family, I have a partner of 20 years, I have a wonderful life; nothing could be better.

The whole point of being in this business and being blessed and being successful is that you're able to do things for your friends or your family, which means that they can have something special in their lives, too.

There's a lot of hate in the world.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything.

Dave and I as a couple seem to be the acceptable face of gayness, and that's great. I've got to use that power to try and do what I can - or we have - to try to make the situations in Russia and Poland better.

When Little Richard used to stand up and play it was just fabulous, and Liberace had the candlesticks and the rings and the gift of the gab. The piano's is the most ungainly rock' n' roll instrument of all time but those two people transcended it, as did Jerry Lee Lewis.

When people go to rehab and come out, they go through a difficult period, but I never had that.

I do work a lot. I mean, most of my income, I would say, comes from live performances. And then you've got publishing, you've got record royalties.

For me, music is so passionate, I have to give it my all every time I go onstage. Onstage, it was always comfortable for me, because that's where I felt at home.

Yeah. I have been with David Furnish for eight years, now.

I went to a mixed school and I can't remember being bullied at school, ever. I was quite large, in those days. Usually, if you're going to be a bully, you'll pick on someone who is small. I didn't bully anybody, and I don't remember being bullied.

I've had an amazing professional life, personal life, but at 64 to have a son who gives us that much love and enjoyment is, wow!

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Don't let the sun go down on me Although I search myself, it's always someone else I see I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free But losing everything is like the sun going down on me.

I was more ashamed that I couldn't work the washing machine than the fact that I was taking drugs.

The AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fueled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference. Science has accomplished miracles over the past 20 years, and science can now end this disease - but it cannot end the epidemic. We need more than medicine. We can do something about these things. We need to speak out about the changes we need to make in our society.

I am the biggest technophobe of all time.

As a child, as a teenager, I was kind of not allowed to wear fashionable clothes.

Who really needs a new album from me?

Bands today have to learn their craft by putting the hard work in that we did when we were young performers.

What we should be doing as musicians is trying to bring people together.

I was just genuinely shy. I'd always been a shy kid.

We have a society where every hit maker and TV presenter is gay.

I mean, in some cases with libel laws, you know, they can write things about people who have no course of action, because they can't afford to take legal action against them.

The world is near escalating to World War Three and where are the leaders of each religion? Why aren't they having a conclave; why aren't they coming together?

It's just so wonderful to have someone in the house like a child to turn your attention to. It's not about you anymore, it's about this lovely little human being.

I hate to say this, but I always listen to the music and the instrumentation first, and then grab on to the lyrics later.

And the danger is - and it's happening - is we're seeing an incredibly big rise amongst young gay people, young heterosexual people as far as catching HIV, which is, you know, in an educated country like this or in Britain, it's frightening.

I have no one to leave the money to. I'm a single man. I like spending my money.

I rarely wear tennis shoes. I'm 5' 8', I hate being short.

I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that; I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.

Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

Well, I'm a huge fan of Ryan Adams, who's from North Carolina. And he's beginning to break really quite big.

We were both very much the same. We were both very impulsive. We both loved life. We both loved shopping. We both had a love of clothes, obviously, because he was the designer that I kind of wore forever and ever.

Love is the key we must turn, truth is the flame we must burn.

I think performers are all show-offs anyway, especially musicians. Unless you show off, you're not going to get noticed.

Better to build a bridge than a wall.

I really appreciate my performing so much better, as I get older. I don't take it for granted anymore. I really relish it and love it.

I used to get my money at the end of the week, buy my mum something, or buy a record, and that was it.

I have an optimistic view of everything. You have to, otherwise you'd go nuts.