“I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.”

“Be ye innocent as doves yet wise as serphants" new testament quoted by Elvis Presley and applied to karate”

“I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.”

“The sun's down and the moon's pretty - it's time to ramble.”

“Once upon a time, there was a generation of parents who were certain that Elvis Presley's unashamed hip-swivellingvwas most certainly the end of society.”

“I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.”

“When things go bad, don't go with them.”

“This was the plan: we would take a holy and sacred picture of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, to the very summit of the earth; once there, we would place it with sincere reverence amongst the chimerical shimmering palaces of ice and snow and then (accompanied by some weird Zen magic) we would light joss sticks, dance about making screechy kung-fu noises, get off our faces, and that would be it: Planet Earth saved. Simple.”

“If a woman is given only a limited amount of time to spend with the man she loves, she endures the separation by constantly recalling and reliving every moment down to the finest detail.”

“Just because I managed to do a little something, I don't want anyone back home to think I got the big head.”

“More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.”