Sometimes they go too far and off the deep end but Michael was teetering on that line of genius and insanity and you’ve never seen anyone walking that tightrope for so long and he did. That man was a special one."

~ Pharrell Williams

You know, while the world called him weird, he wondered why the world was so weird. He’d ask me, Why do people go to war? Why is there genocide? What’s happening in Sudan? Why have we killed the environment? Why is there racism and bigotry and hatred and prejudice? 

We talked about starving children in Mumbai, and he would start to cry. Or we’d start to talk about the trophy-hunting in Canada of the grizzly bear, and he would start to cry. In his mind, the world was psychotic.”

~ Deepak Chopra 

“There was a beehive up in the sound stage and they were falling onto that round circle thing and we were rehearsing. Michael came in and we were running, he was a little bit scared and Tony (Tony Fields) just went up and stamped it thinking ‘I’ll save you” and Michael was heartbroken because he killed a life. He said: ‘That bee had a soul too Tony’“

"I found him to be the hardest worker of anyone that I had worked with and I was fortunate to do many jobs, so I’ve worked with everybody and he just kept saying to me: ‘Let’s do again, let’s do again’. And if he did something incorrect he could be told. You know, a lot of divas can’t be corrected. I remember at the beginning of the shoot one day he had this, like a chocolate bar and I’m allergic to chocolate. I was like: ‘What is it?’ and he goes: ‘Oh, it’s carob’. At that time I didn’t know what carob was. I tasted it and I said: ‘Oh my God, I love that!’ Well, every day from that tiny conversation, every single day, he had a chef find me on the set and bring me a carob bar”

(Här kan ni lyssna till intervjun med dansarna bakom Captain EO)

Bill Whitfield: ..there was one memory that kept running through my mind, a conversation I’d had with Grace back at the Monte Cristo house when I first started working there. She and I were in the garage. I was putting together some of the security equipment, and Grace was at the little workstation she’d set up. Mr Jackson had told her to try and get in touch with somebody. 

She was getting frustrated and she said, “The boss wants me to get in touch with this person, and I keep leaving messages, but nobody’s calling me back. It’s like he forgets sometimes that people don’t want anything to do with him after all this mess.“ I said, ”What mess? What are you talking about?“ 

”The trial,“ she said. ” Since the trial, a lot of people just don’t call back anymore.“

She was giving me the heads up, filling me in on how things worked, like she often did. She started telling me about the days right after the trial was over. ”After he was acquitted,“ she said, ”we had a party at Neverland for him to celebrate, and nobody came.“

”Nobody?“

”A few people,“ she said, ”but not many“.

She said they’d put together a guest list of all these friends and people Mr. Jackson had worked with over the years. They invited close to three hundred people. Maybe fifty showed up. And a lot of people who did come were people that worked for him. People that worked the grounds at Neverland. People from his lawyer’s office. People who were paid to be there. Everyone else called and said they couldn’t make it or they had other things planned.

”And he knew,“ Grace said, ”He knew why they didn’t come. People called him and told that they loved him and that they were praying for him, but very few people would go public and say that they believed him. A lot of people act like his friends but not they’re not really his friends. If he’s not making money, they’re not really around.“

- Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

Beyond the genius of what he was, he was just a genuinely, genuinely nice person. He got me hooked on movies that I would normally never watch. Fred Astaire movies. All the old classics. I would never, never watch those. I remember my fiancée and I telling him we were getting married, and him just being really excited and actually just offering up the ranch to have our wedding there, because privacy was going to be an issue. We wanted to get married in a church, so that's what we wound up doing. But he made the offer. He was just a genuinely nice person who was exceptionally bright, exceptionally bright, and driven and talented. You mix those things together, man, you have Michael Jackson."

~ KOBE BRYANT