Billy Joel Quotes

There's a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we've moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn't play me. They were more conservative than I was.

Over the years, my marks on paper have landed me in all sorts of courts and controversies - I have been comprehensively labelled; anti-this and anti-that, anti-social, anti-football, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-science, anti-republican, anti-American, anti-Australian - to recall just an armful of the antis.

I felt bad about the controversy because they stopped playing my songs on American radio stations. But there was nothing wrong with what I did. Now everybody sings the national anthem the way they want.

Christian bookstores have banned our records, but we don't need them.

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

I am drawn to Christ but I have real problems with the Catholic Church.

Then the album created a tremendous furor and got me kicked off Christian television for two months, and then restored after they settled down and listened to the music and realized there was nothing wrong with it.

I have had the good fortune to experience both the limelight and the traffic light as a musician. I did my first recording on my own and it was available at concerts. The second to seventh were released on small and then large labels. My eighth to 14th were done under my own steam once again, but with the benefit of the Internet.

A labor strike will tear away a lot of the good things going for this league.

I'm a huge Cure fan. I love the Cure. The scales being tipped to when they weren't on a major label compared to when they were seems pretty meaningless. I had the good fortune of having them go before me and seeing their careers, musically at least, lose something. Like a novel written by a dead hand.

In country music, one of the ways we may have gone wrong in the past is trying to be politically correct all the time.

Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and 'clean' versions be made for them to carry.

The Church doesn't censor. It tries to guide its faithful through catechism.

People hate us for showing stuff, and they hate us when we say, 'Fine, we won't show it anymore.'

The Vatican has tried to condemn 'The Magdalene Sisters' as a pack of lies and that I've made it all up - I wish I was that good a dramatist - and in terms of public relations, that was the daftest thing they ever did.

'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.

They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

I think a bishop who doesn't give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.

I think the people at my record label know I'm a Christian and again, I've been really blessed that I've never had to get into a head-butt war over moral standards or anything like that.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Mr. Greene. Some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.

We didn’t sell out our last concert. We’ve got to get the John Birch Society to attack us before the next concert.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't get an email from someone who is angry with me and tells me they're not going to let their kid listen to Imagine Dragons anymore.