Elton John Quotes

So goodbye yellow brick road,
Where the dogs of society howl.
You can't plant me in your penthouse,
I'm going back to my plough.

And it's no sacrifice,
Just a simple word.
It's two hearts living
In two separate worlds.
But it's no sacrifice.
No sacrifice.
It's no sacrifice at all.

The only real problem came with a track called ‘The Last Song’. Bernie’s lyrics were about a man dying of AIDS being reconciled with his estranged father, who had excommunicated him when he found out he was gay. They were beautiful, but I just couldn’t cope with singing them. It was just after Freddie’s death. Somewhere in Virginia, I knew Vance Buck was dying, too. Every time I tried to get the vocal down, I started crying. Eventually I managed it and ‘The Last Song’ was subsequently used as the finale of And the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of, and the fight against, HIV.

You may still be standing, dear,’ it read, ‘but the rest of us are on the fucking floor.

And he said grow some funk of your own amigo,
Grow some funk of your own.
We no like to with the gringo fight,
But there might be a death in Mexico tonight
If you can't grow some funk of your own amigo.

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind,
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
And I would have liked to have known you,
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.

I’m not just behaving like an idiot, I’m behaving like my mother – and rush around issuing desperate apologies to everyone concerned. Mum never snapped out of it, never seemed contrite, never appeared to think she was in the wrong or behaving badly. The best you could hope for was a terrible argument – in which, as ever, she had to have the last word – followed by an awkward smoothing over, a shaky truce that lasted until she went off again. As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff. I’m exaggerating only slightly. We’re talking about a woman who didn’t speak to her own sister for ten years as a result of an argument over whether Auntie Win had put skimmed milk in her tea or not. A woman whose dedication to sulking was such that, at its height, it literally caused her to pack her entire life up and leave the country. It happened in the eighties; she fell out with me and one of Derf’s sons from his first marriage at the same time and, as a result, emigrated to Menorca. She would rather move to a foreign country than back down or apologize. There’s not an enormous amount of point in trying to reason with someone like that.

If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re making your first album.

Im a bitch, Im a bitch
Oh the bitch is back
Stone cold sober as a matter of fact
I can bitch, I can bitch
`cause Im better than you
Its the way that I move
The things that I do

And for another, if you’ve spent your teens trying to play ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ while the clientele of a Northwood Hills pub beat the living shit out of each other, you don’t scare that easily.

`Cause I never thought I'd lose.
I only thought I'd win.
I never dreamed I'd feel
This fire beneath my skin.
I can't believe you love me.
I never thought you'd come.
I guess I misjudged love
Between a father and his son.

You should never take more than you give

Through a glass eye your throne
Is the one danger zone.
Take me to the pilot for control;
Take me to the pilot of your soul.

Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone.

back then, even talking about rock and roll at the Royal Academy would have been sacrilege, like turning up to church and telling the vicar that you’re really interested in worshipping Satan.