“I’m blessed with a good pair of ears. That’s how I fooled my piano teacher. I’d watch his fingers and I’d listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.”

Bass is for people who can’t play guitar.

I’ll be making music ’til the day I die. I’ve done all kinds of stuff, and more is coming.

Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me.

I’ll always leave the same set of strings on my guitars when I’m recording. If I break one I’ll just replace it instead of putting on a whole new set of strings.

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.

Eventually you’ll take the phrases and rhythm patterns you’ve copped and begin to put your own mark on them.

Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Tuborg. My brother would go out to party and get laid, come home at 3am., and I would still be playing with myself.

The one thing I do have is good ears. I don’t mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.

I’m just a normal schmo like anyone else.

I’ve had a hip replacement, I’ve beaten cancer, I had my hand operation, and I stopped drinking. Something inside of me just went, ‘I’m done.’

Everything comes to me while I’m sitting on the pot.

I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.

Nirvana was huge, but it didn’t appeal to everyone.

Best believe that needle hurt you Best to see these true colors Than follow one of your false virtues A little secret to make you think: Why is the crazy stuff we never say, poetry in ink?

The name Van Halen, the family legacy, is going to go on long after I’m gone.

The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument.

The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values.

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.

When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.

The common people don’t believe this kind of religion [of islamic fundamentalists] because first and foremost they want to solve their basic problems, including human rights and economic.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

When it comes to educating all of us about the most basic things in life, it seems to me we need more kindergartens and fewer graduate schools.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.