In those days a concert was a personal experience. I wanted to be as close as possible to the audience and of course big stadiums didn't enable you to do that. It wasn't my style.

Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.

A lot of people would have loved me to keep singing... You come to a point where you have sung, more or less... your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living.

The sexual act - separating that from love itself - is centered solely in the body, whereas spirituality is connected to the whole self. Whether it's a female, a taste, or a sound, all these beautiful things affect our self. We are the perceivers of beauty, and that's why sex doesn't quite go far enough. You can go much further with the spiritual.

In those days a concert was a personal experience. I wanted to be as close as possible to the audience and of course big stadiums didn't enable you to do that. It wasn't my style.

Some extremists take elements of the sacred scriptures out of context.

I tried Zen and Ching, numerology, tarot cards and astrology. I tried to look back into the Bible, and could not find anything. At this time I did not know anything about Islam, and then, what I regarded as a miracle occurred. My brother had visited the mosque in Jerusalem, and was greatly impressed that while on the one hand it throbbed with life.