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

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.

It’s by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.

All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.

I can hear of the brilliant accomplishments of any of my sex with pleasure and rejoice in that liberality of sentiment which acknowledges them.

The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.

I’m obsessed with speed. I’m always asking myself, ‘Why can’t we do things faster? Why can’t it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?’

Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane.

Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.