QuoteLog

“Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos.”

“We played ‘Mustang Sally’ for them. Sigh. That song has killed more musicians than heroin.”

“Lack of skill dictates economy of style.”

“To me, that’s treason. I call it treason against rock ‘n’ roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics. When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I’d run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick. If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”

“No one can come and claim ownership of my work. I am the creator of it, and it lives within me.”

“I wish more journalists would confront stars with drug problems and ask them, ‘Don’t your fans think you’re an asshole for getting high?’”

“It’s not about the car, that’s just something to wrap around the stereo.”

“There’s certain songs I don’t play anymore, just like there’s certain words I don’t say anymore. It’s not me anymore. Don’t follow me way back there. There’s no more envelope to push. I pushed it off the table. It’s on the floor. Let’s move forward now.”

“Jackson Browne was a bona fide rock ‘n’ roll sex symbol. My wife says he still is ... we were drawing rooms full of men ... meanwhile, Jackson was drawing more women than an Indigo Girls concert.”

“The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn’t, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that’s a bonus.”

“We tend at the moment ... to try to find a moment when a song is right. You stick the pin in the butterfly and put it in the box and you sell the box. Music is actually a living thing that evolves.”

“It’s hard to believe Michael Jackson used to be a black man. Now he looks like a very odd white woman.”

“The blues are the roots, everything else is the fruits.”

“I think one of the things about that period was because you weren’t given images, you made up your own images. You listen to the music and it just took you to another world.”

“It was easy to quickly ascertain that all the featured songs are the same tired dreck I hear every time I turn on the radio. I was finally able to associate band names with songs I’ve heard, though, so I suppose that’s a plus. Now I know whom I hate.”

“The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear.”

“You gotta be really careful what you bite off. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s a dangerous world.”

“I’ve made an embarrassing amount of money in this business for a borderline Marxist.”

“It’s a very weird situation because I keep asking myself how I suddenly was thrust into the position of being travel agent for death. You know, spokesperson for the doomed. But then of course the whole point of why it’s so strange is that I had already assigned myself that role so many years of writing ago.”

“The music might have died in a frozen cornfield in Iowa in 1959, but it took the industry another 20 - 30 years to really cut the heart out of it.”

“Essentially, I try to be as much myself as I can be in as public a context as I can manage. I’ll navigate it as best I can. The most intelligent approach is not to believe that you can control it, but to accept wherever it takes you.”

“You know, there are demons in me, 47 at last count, and the only time they get out is when we’re on stage.”

“Doing creative work is like running a marathon, you’ve got to do it really regularly.”

“Most teenagers attending Ozzfest last week had cell phones to connect them quickly to their family and friends, whereas back in the 70’s Black Sabbath cultivated the sort of fan who was alienated far beyond a roam signal.”

“[Michael] Jackson is not so much a person of colour as an experiment in sequential hues.”

“I’m an old woman’s wish and a young woman’s dream.”

“I’d harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.”

“To be Ozzy Osbourne, it could be worse. I could be Sting.”

“If you don’t have a sense of humor, you’ll hurt yourself getting angry at me.”

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

“What I like, I lick, What I don’t, I kick, And I don’t like you.”

“Rock and roll never sleeps. It just passes out.”

“I have a hard time addressing adults as ‘P. Diddy’ or ‘Puffy’ with a straight face.”

“He has a woman’s name and wears makeup. How original.”

“The great thing about hanging out with Republicans, it is very, very, very unhip for both of us. There’s kind of a parity of pain there.”

“First He made the mountains Then He filled up the sea He lost His concentration Workin’ on you and me.”

“The blues is a healer. It healed me and it’ll heal you.”

“Miraculously, the first set we played was full of uplift. But I really spun out for the second set, I couldn’t find my footing, and my wife said I was doing all this playing in the upper register. And I could only respond that I was thinking about those high floors.”

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

“The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.”

“I chose not to take the standard options in my business--going to Vegas and singing your great hits, if you’re lucky, or going to hell, which is where Elvis went.”

“I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of vaginas. They bother me in the way that spiders bother some people.”

“The only thing I thought might ever kill me off was clean living. I thought, ‘How am I going to listen to that horrible noise I make without a gram of coke and a couple of double Jack Daniels?’ “

“There’s something about me that makes a lot of people want to throw up.”

“I’m the Connie Francis of rock ‘n’ roll.”

“I’m not conceited. Conceit is a fault and I have no faults.”

“Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being posessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.”

“Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”