"I was just singing with my then-boyfriend, Lindsey, and we had nothing, no money. And I worked. He didn't work. He furiously practiced his guitar every day, all day-and I backed that up. And then we got a call from a famous guy in a famous band [Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac] who said, 'Do you wanna join our band? We actually went back and forth about it: 'Well, maybe we don't. Maybe we just want to do what we're doing now.' And between January and my birthday in May we became famous."

-[Stevie] Interview Magazine

"I just said, 'Well, y'know Stevie and I are a package deal.'"

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"Is there some way Lindsey and I can add to this, and can they add something to us?"

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"It wasn't an easy decision; we believed in what we had going as a twosome, but we thought it over and we realized that we probably had a great deal to learn from these people, and that they could help us and we could help them...and we did it."

-[Lindsey] The Penguin Biography

 "I love the mystical part of rock'n'roll and you do that with me, Lindsey. I think we can add something to this band."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"We had a lot of problems by the time we joined."

-[Lindsey] Microsoft Music Central

"It's been very much a series of situations, of having to adapt. The kind of role that, say, Stevie and I had towards each other and that I had in Buckingham Nicks as compared to what happened six months after we joined Fleetwood Mac-I really had to turn around. It was a very good thing to happen. I gained so much more appreciation for Stevie that way. I had to reevaluate the whole thing. There's been a lot of adapting to do. "

-[Lindsey] Musician Listener and Player Magazine June 1981

"It's difficult to keep your perspective, it's difficult to know who your friends are."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"This is the most unlikely group of people to somehow mold into something that has unity at all."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"My relationship with Lindsey was tumultuous."
-[Stevie] Playboy Magazine, 1982

"Stevie and I, even when we were lovers, we never were really best friends. [W]e've always competed...ever since we started going together back in 1971. [There was always] tension on a musical level...even though we were excellent lovers, we were competitors as well."

-[Lindsey] BBC Radio Interview 1984

"I also remember getting very upset with Lindsey one night when I realized that he and Christine [McVie] had written "World Turning." I had been with Lindsey all those years and we had never written a song together. Plus, I walked into the studio and they were singing it together... "

-[Stevie] SPIN Magazine October 1997

"The [Rolling Stone cover] shoot was over and everyone else got out of the bed, except for Stevie and I. We laid there for about an hour hugging, and it was freaking everybody out."

-[Lindsey] VH1 All Access

"I try to keep the peace and I always did."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"It was like…we were so stoned."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"The fact that you go on stage and you…uh…y'know, mass adjulation is washing over you, unconditional adjulation. How do you deal with that and then go home to your wife and worry about the normal things that everyone has to worry about?"

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"[Christine and I] would hide out in each other's rooms so that Lindsey and John wouldn't know where we were if they wanted to get into an argument."

-[Stevie] Harper's Bazaar November 1997

"I don't think I had ever been so tired in my whole life as I was when we were like - doing that. You know I think it was shocking me ~ the whole rock'n'roll life ~ was really heavy and it was so much work and it was so everyday intense you know. Being in Fleetwood Mac was like being in the army. It was like you have to be there. You have to be there and you have to be there as on time as you can be there. And even if there nothing you have to do, you have to be there. So Gold Dust Woman was really my kind of symbolic look at somebody going through a bad relationship, and doing alot of drugs, and trying to just make it ~ trying to live ~ you know trying to get through it to the next thing."
-[Stevie] VH1 The Making of Rumours, 1997

"I wondered what that would do to me on down the line. I might be a ruler, but maybe I'd be lousy lover."
-[Stevie] SPIN Magazine, October, 1997

"When you're in Fleetwood Mac and when you have shows to do, you can't bring your private life into that."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"The best explanation is: try working with your secretary in a raucaus office…then come home with her at night. See how long you can stand her. I could be no comfort to Lindsey when he needed comfort."

-[Stevie] Rolling Stone 1977

"Let's put it this way, we hardly spoke. We would get on and off the same plane without interacting at all. It's not like that now. It got so bad between us that we couldn't even talk. We couldn't communicate. We couldn't work anything out because we couldn't even sit down for five minutes together. "

-[Stevie] Microsoft Music Central

"I really don't think we quite got over that."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"It was a very complex situation."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"It was like being a hostage in Iran and, to an extent, Lindsey was the Ayatollah."

-[Stevie] People Magazine February 22, 1982

"Fleetwood Mac was a group of five very strong individuals who never really should have been able to work together at all and somehow did. It was an emotionally charged situation from start to finish, because you had these couples who had broken up and somehow summoned up the character to separate their priorities and keep going. It screwed us all up a bit, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was better music through chemistry."

-[Lindsey] The San Diego Union-Tribute March 7, 1993

"Devastation leads to writing good things."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"Loving you isn't the right thing to do."

-[Lindsey] "Go Your Own Way"

"I very very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Everytime I those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, 'I'll make you suffer for leaving me.' And I did."

-[Stevie] Rolling Stone October 30, 1997

"Oh it bugged me terrible. And I had to listen to it every night and sing along with it. It would just put me back in the place where Lindsey and I were when he wrote that song… back to our apartment [where he was] really angry with me. It was kind of like I had to revisit the world of the big fight every time he sang it."

-[Stevie] The Phoenix Gazette June 6, 1994

"I'll begin not to love you."

-[Stevie] "Silver Springs"

"[about "Silver Springs"] I'm so angry with you. You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you."
-[Stevie] Arizona Republic, August 12, 1997

"So you don't want to be my wife, my girlfriend, but you want me to do all that magic stuff on your songs. Is there anything else that you want, just, like, in my spare time?"

-[Lindsey] Rolling Stone October 30, 1997

"I didn't want to do that, didn’t want to help her."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"Very very hard to break up when you're in a band, because you have to be together the next morning in the breakfast room."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"Stevie and I would have to work together, and we would have to look at eachother and sing to eachother."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"Being in this band really fucks up relationships with chicks. Since Stevie and I have found this to be true. I could meet someone that I really like, have maybe a few days to get it together and that's about it. The rest of the time, I'm too into Fleetwood Mac"

-[Lindsey] Rolling Stone March 1977

"We just could not work together."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"Having to put your…say, Stevie's feelings for me and my feelings for Stevie, putting them over in a corner of the room and getting on with your process and the process of the room, it was very challenging."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"You don't want to sit in the same room, be on a plane after a show, with somebody who hates you. It was not fun."

-[Stevie] Rolling Stone October 30, 1997

"There was a lot of theater and drama in that, was not exactly a musical."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"We had some kind of fight and he came over- might have kicked me, did something to me, and we stopped the show. He went off, and we all ran at breakneck speed back to the dressing room to see who could kill him first. Christine got to him first, and I got to him second- the bodyguards were trying to get in the middle of all of us."

-[Stevie] Rolling Stone October 30, 1997

"As crazy as it got, there was still part of a family thing."

-[Stevie] VH1 Behind the Music

"That all goes back to Lindsey and I going together. As wild as the story is and as many times as it's been told, when you go with somebody for six or seven years and you're a woman and the guy you're with is a man who is a guitarist/songwriter, da da da da, and so are you, there's always going to be an ego problem just because of the relationship."

-[Stevie] The Record February 1982

"Stevie and I talked, but sometimes it was difficult not to be confrontational, not to be combatant."

-[Lindsey] VH1 Behind the Music

"I don't think there's ever been a competitive element between any members except for Lindsey (Buckingham) and me, and that started way before Fleetwood Mac and goes right on to this day and will go on till we die. That's just the way we are --- Mr. and Mrs. Intense."

-[Stevie] The Arizona Republic August 18, 1983

"It got so bad that I said, "I'm gonna do a solo record," much to Mick and Lindsey's absolute horror. From that moment on, I got treated much worse. However, they couldn't be too awful to me, 'cause they knew that they couldn't go out on the road without me. So they had to keep a certain level of niceness. Otherwise they knew I'd walk. I mean, I had platinum records and sold-out tours. Why did I need to be treated like this? There was plenty of jealousy in the air, but I felt so beaten down that I wanted to run away and hide."

-[Stevie] The Island Ear 1994

"Stevie has never been very happy, and I don’t think the success of her album has made her any happier. In fact it may have made her less happy."

-[Lindsey] The Record September 1982

 "I love Lindsey. I love him very, very much and I wanted Lindsey to make it and I wanted this album to be as successful as...If this album is more successful than my album, I would be so glad. You know, when "Trouble" (the single from Buckingham's LP) came out, I was saying, let it go straight to the top. Because it only makes my life easier when Lindsey is happy. 'Cause when Lindsey is happy, he's really in a good humor and he's wonderful and he and I really get along and we're close. For me, when you love somebody, you want them to be the best."

-[Stevie] The Record February 1982
 

"We don't see each other at all, really, I think there's an inherent care and love there that will never really go away, but it's not practiced at all. There is very little common ground anymore."

-[Lindsey] Rock Magazine November 1984

-[Lindsey] Rolling Stone August 27, 1997

"I knew he would be going long before he did. He was terribly unhappy."

-[Stevie] Rock World January 1993

"Lindsey and I had been going together from about 1971 to 1976. But we never really broke up until that moment [his leaving in 1987]."

-[Stevie] The Dallas Morning News April 2, 1993

"Oh, really. Did she say that? That surprises me. She went through quite a number of men, ah..I'm surprised to hear that actually. That's very interesting…"

-[Lindsey] The Dallas Morning News April 2, 1993

"I have total respect for him. I don't know if he has any for me. He feels I broke up our team. So, for that, in his mind, I should be tortured for days and then killed. That's the way he feels to this day."

-[Stevie] The Island Ear 1994

"Life goes on no matter how bad or what kind of tragedy you're involved in, a heartbroken love affair or whatever it is.' You will make it. Because I'm proving it. I'm telling you that I've been through it all and I'm still here."
-[Stevie] Revolution, 1989

"It's pivotal between being sad about things that have basically died for you and being able to move forward and find other things that are alive for you."

-[Lindsey] The Dallas News April 2,1993

"But, basically, I think Lindsey and I had sung our last song. We had taken that relationship as far as it could go without one of us killing the other. Plus, he had treated me badly for so long. I'd walk into a room and he'd become the most sarcastic, unpleasant man on the face of the earth."

-[Stevie] The Island Ear 1994

"What was even more amazing was getting Lindsey on stage with the four of us again. It took the President of the United States to do that. We all didn't think Lindsey would do it. I called him and said, "If you cheat me out of this honoring moment, I'll never or speak to you again." So he did it."
-[Stevie] The Island Ear 1994

"He-doesn't speak to me; we don't speak at all actually. He only, played at the inauguration because I called him on the phone and begged him."

-[Stevie] USA Today August 1994

"I haven't talked to him since the inauguration We're really not friends. We're really not anything. We did not break up friends, and we have never been friends since. He is not really able to have any kind of relationship with me. I just bug him to death. Everything I do is abrasive to him. He's scary when he gets mad. "

-[Stevie] Rolling Stone September 1994

"It was very hard to leave [Fleetwood Mac]. I just couldn't leave them after Lindsey left [in 1987]. I couldn't do that to-- them. I just couldn't. But after Lindsey came and played the inaguration with us, I realized I could never deal with Fleetwood Mac again unless it would be the five of us. And it never will be that way again. So I decided my part in that particular Shakespearean drama is over."

-[Stevie] The Boston Herald July 17, 1994

"I can't see [a reunion] happening, but I'd have to feel them out. I could see Lindsey doing it if we offered some exorbitant amount of money. Me, personally...I would have to get a friendly, hopeful vibe from him, which unusually isn't there. I don't need money that bad. It's not worth it."

-[Stevie] The Island Ear 1994