Quote Of The Day By Michael Jackson: 'Friendship Is A Thing I Am Just Beginning To Learn About. I Was Raised ...'

Michael Jackson had the kind of musical career that seems unimaginable, even today. As a child, he rose to prominence as the lead singer of family ensemble the Jackson 5, whose first four singles for Motown Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. After the Jackson 5's unlikely meteoric rise, Michael started building incredible momentum as an adult singer and dancer, leading to one of the most influential career arcs of the '70s and '80s. His 1982 album "Thriller" is cited as the best-selling album in the world, with seven of its nine tracks becoming Top 10 hits; his subsequent advances in fashion, choreography, and music videos during the early days of MTV made him arguably the single most famous person on the planet. "Michael," a biopic of his early life released in 2026, grossed over $1 billion worldwide.

But even his biggest fans would concede that success had a considerable cost. Jackson famously lamented the loss of a typical childhood in his later years, faced a well-publicized string of legal troubles, and died tragically at the age of 50. Michael Jackson offers today's quote of the day with a bittersweet reflection on what his success may have cost him — and his attempts to reclaim some of those missing pieces.

"Friendship is a thing I am just beginning to learn about. I was raised on the stage and that is where I am comfortable."

Michael Jackson shared this reflection in an interview with Ebony in 1982 (via Vanity Fair). At the time, Jackson was getting ready to release "Thriller," the follow-up album to 1979's "Off the Wall" — the first solo LP he released as an adult. 

At the same time, he was also openly fascinated with the wonder of childhood: the Ebony piece was accompanied by a cover photo of Jackson holding hands with the title character of Steven Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," as part of a promotion for a storybook album based on the film, which Jackson narrated and released alongside "Thriller." This mix of childish things and serious topics permeated much of the "Thriller" era, where songs like "Billie Jean" (a paranoid meditation on a false paternity claim) could be just as successful as "Thriller," a song about movie monsters.

Even before he literally wrote a song with that title, the price of fame was a subject that weighed heavily on Michael Jackson during his lifetime. While his gifts as an entertainer knew few parallels, he remained very open about how success, particularly from such a young age, was isolating. "I was looking for people to talk to," he stated in Shmuley Boteach's book "The Michael Jackson Tapes," when discussing making "Thriller." "I was so lonely I would cry in my room upstairs."

Through Jackson's tribulations, we are reminded of the need for young people, in a time of crucial personal development, to live their lives as normally as possible: make friends, experience typical joys and heartbreaks, and use those experiences to grow up into well-adjusted adults. 

Such lessons may well solve some of the music industry's most questionable decisions — and would certainly prevent more cautionary tales like Jackson and his own often-tragic family.

• "If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades."
• "I love to write songs. It's one of my favorite things to do. It's very spiritual. It's a connection — I'm just the source through which it comes."
• "I hate labels, because it should be just music. Call it disco, call it anything, it's music to me, it's beautiful to the ear, and that's what counts. It's like you hear a bird chirping, you don't say, 'That's a bluejay, this one is a crow.' It's a beautiful sound, that's all that counts."
• "I always enjoyed the feeling of being on stage — the magic that comes. When I hit the stage it's like all of a sudden a magic from somewhere just comes and the spirit just hits you and you just lose control of yourself."
• "If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with."