Phil Collins Quotes

I am stopping so I can be a full time father to my two young sons on a daily basis.

Find a way to my heart, and I will always be with you.

There's no magic for getting into the groove... just banging away at it. Sometimes the lyrics come first, sometimes the music.

Take a look at me now, cause there's just an empty space. And you coming back to me is against all odds and that's what I've got to face.

As soon as you start making a record, things start getting lined up: the promotion, possibly even a tour.

I very rarely listen to the in-flight stuff.

I usually hang around the room listening to a bit of last night's show. If there's one available, I go to the steam room every day for my voice. I spend half an hour there and then I eat, because I can't eat later than four o'clock. Then I go for a soundcheck. That's my day.

Catering on planes, like on British Rail, is a standing joke, but I don't really have a problem with it. I don't quite know what people expect.

As I've got older, I've got more understanding of relationships and how they work - but every single relationship has different dynamics, so you can't paint everyone with the same colour.

Put your faith in what you most believe in.

To be honest, I couldn't hold a conversation with anybody in any language other than English - and that's a struggle sometimes!

To be honest, producing records interests me less at the moment and I really don't want to get involved in album projects that are going to take up a lot of time

Drummers get bored. You tell them to play something simple, and it gets more complicated as they do it. If they're not a composer, if they don't have any kind of investment in the music, they'll just add a bit there and another bit there, and you think no! Don't do that. So you end up using a drum machine.

I used to go to my local pub and it was like a sanctuary, nobody dared ask for an autograph. You went in there for a ploughman's and a pint, and you went home and watched TV. Believe me, there's more to watch on British TV than American, except for CNN right now. But yeah, I miss it.

I do miss things about Britain. I think there was a misconception, there definitely was, that I left because of bad press, and being pilloried. I left Britain because I fell in love with someone who lived in Switzerland - that was the main thing.

All I set out to do was to earn a living playing drums, you know? And as luck would have it, I've surpassed that.

I'm usually going to make a record, finish a record, start a record or start a tour or between tours.

There's something perverse isn't there, if you're playing in front of 100,000 people and there's 2000 people down the front who don't like, you think: what is it that they don't like?

I'm sorry that it was all so successful. I honestly didn't mean it to happen like that. It's hardly surprising that people grew to hate me.

Before you write - remember that every speech has something of 'you' in the writing. Don't take that away when you write. Be yourself. Be comfortable in your own skin.

Love can make you do things that you never thought possible

And I would like to marry and have more children. I would like to try and do it right.

The world is in your hands, now use it.

I don't want to preach, but I really think the rudiments are very important to developing your drumming skills. Many of the patterns I've recorded came from things like paradiddles, flam paradiddles, flam triplets... They might be boring to sit down and practice, but not when you apply them to the drums.

That's going to be on my headstone: 'He came. He wrote 'In the Air Tonight.' He... died.'

Like last night I had a sequence with a gun and, to be honest, for me to be threatening with a gun and not be comical is quite hard.

Often there's a BA crew, because half the time we stay at the same hotels, especially in Australia. I can remember spending quite a lot of time with crews around the pool there. They always make themselves known to us.

No seriously... when there's families, you tend to go back to your room after the gig rather than go for a drink with the other guys. But there's always someone who's got something going, like the tour manager.

We're all turkeys! Some of us are running around with our heads cut off, some of us are flapping our wings that hard we're close to flying. But nothing is an eagle bar God.

As a composer I approached the drums differently than a non-composing drummer. I embraced drum machines.

I've got one of four known Davy Crocket rifles. It's fantastic just to know it's one of the rifles that he actually used. His cousin had it.

I suppose you can't take kids into consideration all the time, but I just wish there could be a bit of flexibility.

I never said I was at the Alamo. Someone else said I was at the Alamo. Now I'm a nutter. I don't think that's fair.

To me, groups of musicians playing together, not fighting each other, but playing a groove together is one of the most exciting things to listen to.

The binding of reason and intuition is the fundamental crisis of the era we call humanity. Transcedence of duality is the key.

Considering yourself selflessly selfish is a principle of all great thinkers

Many people think of me as a perfectionist, someone who polishes and shines each song and performance. I've always been bothered by that assumption.

I just figured if I'm going to call myself a songwriter throughout my life, then writing for most genres of music is something I should at least attempt.

When destiny calls you, you've got to be strong. I may not be with you, but you've got to move on.

If it's the beginning of something - like an album, I'm working on the lyrics and I take a walkman and headset.

Testimony is contingent on experience, that's why we're all free spirits

'Urban Renewal' was sweet because I've been - unfairly, I would say - plonked in the middle of the road because of a handful of songs. It came at a good time for me, because you do take a bit of a browbeating and, as you get older, you become better at accepting it and realizing why it happens.

Deep inside us we're not that different at all.

I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.

We all have the same problems in relationships.

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.

In 1977 we played America and Europe three times, and Japan - my marriage suffered as a result. My then wife took the kids to Canada to be near her parents

I'm not trying necessarily to become a movie star; that wouldn't be bad but that's not the aim. I'm just trying to do interesting things and go into areas where I've not been before.