"Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t just come out of thin air. I did a bit of research, although it was tongue in cheek and it was mock opera. Why not? I certainly wasn’t saying I was an opera fanatic and I knew everything about it."
— Freddie Mercury
"Freddie was fully focused, never allowing anything or anyone to get in the way of his vision for the future. He was truly a free spirit. There are not many of these in the world. To achieve this, you have to be, like Freddie, fearless—unafraid of upsetting anyone’s apple cart."
— Brian May
"It was tragic that that terrible bloody disease should break up Freddie’s career, because he was improving and improving as a singer and a performer. It was just a terrible shame. He felt that he couldn’t deliver what was expected of him. I miss him tremendously."
— Roger Taylor
"Freddie mainly used the piano for songwriting but there were times when he’d get inspiration when he wasn’t around his instrument. One of the last songs he wrote, A Winter’s Tale, was written purely sat looking out on the mountains from the other side of Lake Geneva. He could obviously hear it all in his head, although he didn’t have any musical instruments with him. I remember him coming into the studio and saying: “I’ve got this idea. Just give me a few minutes.” Then he brought it to life. That’s a beautiful track. It doesn’t philosophise, it’s just about how beautiful life is."
— Brian May
"I feel he’s still here in some ways because his music is still here. He was my brother, but a megastar too. Simply speaking, I don’t know what it was like to have an ordinary brother because my own brother was so extraordinary."
— Kashmira Cooke, Freddie’s sister
"We did have sex together regulary. Yes, yes. It took a while. When it happened, it was beautiful and innocent. I was completely in love with him by this time and he told me that he loved me. We even talked of getting married. Of course he would still pick up gay guys and bring them back night after night, but I didn’t mind. I continued to take lovers myself. To a certain point..then Freddie started to show off and would kick them out. He would often say he didn’t enjoy sleeping with all those guys, in the end he didn’t care about sex. He just craved tenderness and affection."
— Barbara Valentin on Freddie Mercury
"When I first met Montserrat Caballé, I didn’t know how to approach her. You have this idea of a super diva walking in but she really made me feel at ease. She said she’d heard of me and got all my albums and started listening to all the old Queen records because she thought she was going to have to sing something like that! I said, oh no dear, I’m not going to give you all those Brian May guitar parts to sing, that’s the last thing I want to do!"
— Freddie Mercury
"Jimi Hendrix really had everything any rock’n’roll star should have - style and presence. He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be."
— Freddie Mercury on Jimi Hendrix
"I love them. I’m the biggest Queen fan ever. My mother tells me the first time I cried without crying just to try to get something was when Freddie Mercury died. They’re the kind of band that’s just in your DNA, really. Everyone just knows who they are."
— Adele
"I think the name “Queen” actually fitted that time, in the days of glam rock when they started painting their faces and everything. It was a David Bowie and Roxy Music time. In a way it’s sort of happening again. It was just a phase that people were going through."
— Freddie Mercury, 1984.
"I think the press had their final bit of vitriol against Freddie when he died. We had some nasty reports saying that he deserved to die because he had a promiscuous lifestyle, quite unbelievable things people wrote. Certainly the Freddie that we knew wasn’t wildly promiscuous or any of these things that people were saying. He had a very responsible attitude to everyone that he was close to and he was a very generous and caring person to all the people that came through his life. More than that you can’t ask."
— Brian May
"Freddie’s biggest thing was to have a family and a normal life. I had a problem about few years ago when I got badly screwed by an accountant and had to pay lots of back taxes. I was discussing my problem with Freddie one day and said I couldn’t deal with it all. He told me: ‘It’s only money! Why worry about something like that? You’ve got it made, you’ve got everything you need - a wonderful family and children. You have everything I can never have.’ That’s when I became aware that when he was at our house he was watching everything and taking it all in and seeing what a family life was like and how it could have made him happy. I believe Freddie would have liked a family very, very much. He was very sentimental in many ways. His close relationship with Mary carried on until the end, maybe because he felt guilty at never marrying her, and everybody who was close to him was treated as part of a family to some extent."
— Reinhold Mack about Freddie Mercury
"He lived life to the full. He devoured life. He celebrated every minute. And, like a great comet, he left a luminous trail which will sparkle for many generations to come."
— Brian May on Freddie Mercury
"Some people can take second best but I can’t. If you’ve got the taste for being number one, then number two isn’t good enough."
— Freddie Mercury
"The Queen video where we really nailed it was “I Want to Break Free,” where they’re in drag. We didn’t stop laughing for three days. We were ill from laughing. Freddie Mercury was desperately shy. It was a hell of a job to get him out of the dressing room. I’d say, “Come on, Fred, don’t be silly, let’s go.” He’d say, “All right darling, all right.” He called me Mistress Mallet. He used to shout, “Come on girls, Mistress Mallet’s here."
— David Mallet
