“If you have a great-sounding guitar that’s a quality instrument and a good amp, and you know how to make the guitar talk, that’s the key. It starts with the guitar and knowing what it should sound and feel like.”

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.

I boil the strings so they stretch.

There are really three parts to the creative process. First there is inspiration, then there is the execution, and finally there is the release.

The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months.

Rock stars come and go. Musicians play until they die.

I think Clapton is brilliant. He’s the only one who moved me. The only one who made me want to play the guitar.

Holdsworth is so damned good that I can’t cop anything. I can’t understand what he’s doing. I’ve got to do this [does two-hand tapping], whereas he’ll do it with one hand.

It’s always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you’re the same, and they hate you if you’re different.

I have selective hearing.

The fundamental nature of jealousy and envy is a feeling of inadequacy. If you were really blissful, you should not be envious of anyone.

I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness than I had for a long, long time before.

Darling, you are a warrior, for even though each day feels like a battle, you keep fighting and live on.

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.

I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.