Top 280 Elton John Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top.”

— Elton John

252. “No drugs, except maybe poppers.”

— Elton John

253. “Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just happened.”

— Elton John

254. “You know, I’ve got 1,000 candles in a closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I’ll tell you what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.”

— Elton John

255. “Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she’d ever worked with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.”

— Elton John

256. “But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on homosexuals.”

— Elton John

257. “There was a funny little guy we knew who – in keeping with the flower-power mood of the times – had changed his name to Hans Christian Anderson. The aura of fairy tale otherworldliness conjured by this pseudonym was slightly punctured when he opened his mouth and a thick Lancashire accent came out. Eventually he changed his first name back to Jon and became the lead singer of Yes.”

— Elton John

258. “And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.”

— Elton John

259. “Every time I caught Dee’s eye – wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as ridiculous as ever – I had a fit of the giggles.”

— Elton John

260. “It’s worth pointing out that Renate didn’t just marry a gay drug addict. That would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life was about to go haywire in ways he hadn’t previously thought possible. I.”

— Elton John

261. “AIDS might as well stand for “Appalling Indifference to the Disenfranchised in Society.”

— Elton John

262. “For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened.”

— Elton John

263. “This was not the way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.”

— Elton John

264. “It seems insane now that no one even raised an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it was a different world then.”

— Elton John

265. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been driven very slowly through a crowd of screaming fans, in full view of the world’s media, on a gold-painted golf cart with a pair of enormous illuminated glasses and a bow tie on the front, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it’s a pretty excruciating experience.”

— Elton John

266. “But the fact that he never expressed it instilled in me a desire to show him that I’d made the right decision. It made me driven. I thought the more successful I got, the more it proved him wrong, whether he acknowledged it or not. Even today, I still sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and he’s been dead since 1991.”

— Elton John

267. “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.”

— Elton John

268. “I worked really hard, maybe too hard, but it felt like there was an unstoppable momentum behind me that carried me on no matter how exhausted I was, that drove me through any kind of setback.”

— Elton John

269. “I looked like a finalist in a competition to find Britain’s least convincing flower child.”

— Elton John

270. “Presumably already alive to the thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in my utter degradation.”

— Elton John

271. “I was constantly in fear, metaphorically speaking, of getting a smack.”

— Elton John

272. “I’m sure the music at Boy would have sounded as wonderful as ever, but there does come a point where, in that environment, you start to feel like the dowager duchess at the debutantes’ ball, peering down your pince-nez at the latest arrivals.”

— Elton John

273. “But I’d rather try and build a bridge to someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall.”

— Elton John

274. “One song, ‘All The Nasties’, was about me, wondering aloud what would happen if I came out publicly: ‘If it came to pass that they should ask – what would I tell them? Would they criticize behind my back? Maybe I should let them’. Not a single person seemed to notice what I was singing about.”

— Elton John

275. “I would shut myself away in my room, just like I had as a kid when my parents were fighting, and try and ignore what was happening.”

— Elton John

276. “Then again, if I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and punch someone in the face, it might as well be John Reid; he could take it as payback for thumping me when we were a couple.”

— Elton John

277. “I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t want to die.”

— Elton John

278. “The next morning found me pacing around the house, trying to work out what was the earliest you could call someone who’d been out the previous night at a Halloween party, without looking like the kind of person they’d eventually have to get a restraining order out against.”

— Elton John

279. “Far from being reassured, our fellow safari-goers – dressed in a way more befitting the climate – kept passing troubled glances our way, as if the safari party had been joined by a couple of maniacs.”

— Elton John

280. “But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days.”

— Elton John

281. “Living is the best and we must live every day as it comes.”

— Elton John

282. “You can work as hard as you like, and plan as carefully as you want, but there are moments when it’s just about a hunch, about trusting your instincts, or about fate.”

— Elton John

283. “You get up in the morning after you’ve slept with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: ‘Why have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?’ It’s just weird. It really takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss.”

— Elton John

284. “It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know what’s around the corner. Maybe that gave me some real clarity about what was important to me about life. Why try and deny how you really feel, deep down, about something as fundamental as fatherhood?”

— Elton John

285. “The launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers sounds, I think I’ll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.”

— Elton John

286. “He was a typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character.”

— Elton John

287. “As a result, I’m probably the only British musician of the sixties who went to work on the Reeperbahn and came back still in possession of his virginity.”

— Elton John

288. “If she wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place.”

— Elton John

289. “I wished that things had been different, but it was what it was. Sometimes you have to look at the hand you’ve been dealt and throw in.”

— Elton John

290. “Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find things liven up quite considerably.”

— Elton John

291. “When I told him what I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell.”

— Elton John