“There’s a plaque on our wall that says we’ve sold over 65 million albums, and I don’t feel I’ve accomplished anything. I feel like I’m just getting started.”

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.

I’m writing, and just doing the same thing I always do.

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

I haven’t taken an overdose of sleeping pills and called my agent. I haven’t been in jail, and I don’t go running to the psychiatrist every two minutes. That’s something of an accomplishment these days.

I was thinking too fast. It seems like a person has the tendency to get bored, because he always wants to try to do all these accomplishments.

Purpose is when you know and understand what you were born to accomplish. Vision is when you see it in your mind and begin to imagine it

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

Man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished.

There is literally nothing that I ever asked to do, that I asked the blessed Creator to help me to do, that I have not been able to accomplish.

You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.