The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing for the most part.

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.

For instance I'm always fascinated to see whether given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.

Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

Once you make a movie like 'Superbad ' when it's popular and you're the lead you get offered all kinds of things and there's a temptation to make bad movies either for the money or to maintain your relevance in pop culture.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture including TV magazines movies and video games.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation popular hits came out of shows and movies.

I was never into the popular school or clique or anything. Then I started doing movies when I was in high school so then I got popular. Then the girls paid attention to you who didn't before.

Mom and Pop were proud of my popularity but from their point of view show business was no way to make a living.

My older sister was at the cusp of new wave and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

We live in a society obsessed with public opinion. But leadership has never been about popularity.

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.

That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.

Lincoln's stature and strength his intelligence and ambition - in short all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village.

Regardless of who originally made it popular any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.

The great thing about university is that they incline you to get up and do it from the Classics to modern plays to the humor that Monty Pythons made popular.

Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.