David lee roth quotes

The only thing I'm allergic to is criticism.

Whether I'm on for a day or whether I'm on for a year, at the end of the day, I sing for my dinner.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

When you can spell subpoena without thinking about it, that's when you know you've made it.

Many of the critics have kids of their own. It scares the hell out of them to think that their kids could be anything remotely like David Lee Roth.

Being a rock star is being a rock star, I don't need to go into the details. What would you do if you were a rock star?

You gotta learn the alphabet, backwards and forwards. And then the choice is yours, 'cause last I looked, the Bible is written in the same words, the exact same alphabet, as my favorite pornography. Choice is yours.

What's missing is the testosterone. What's missing is the fury. What's missing is the passionate convicted commitment. And I got a lot of mine from my religious background. So y'all best stop imagining the way Dr. Zorba looked, or some defenseless Hasidic Jew with a little yarmulke on his head, 'cause that ain't here for you.

The best time is during the struggle. The top of the mountain is usually small, freezing and lonesome. To this day I'm continually reinvesting myself in something new. I'm not afraid to start as a beginner in anything.

The Breakfast of Champions isn't cereal, it's the competition!

People ask me how far I've come. And I tell them twelve feet: from the audience to the stage.

Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.

Van Halen can keep providing the rain and I'll keep providing the parade.

Maybe I'm like acts of Congress or your favorite Chinese restaurant - you don't really want to know what's going on behind the door. I'm a real study in contrast, I expect, looking from without. But it adds up to what you get on stage.

Music journalists love Elvis Costello and hate me because they look like Elvis Costello

It's always irritated me that people say, 'Where's the action? Oh wow, there's no action here; let's go somewhere else.' These people will never find the action.

He who knows how will always work for he who knows why.

Music videos are like girlfriends. I'm constantly amazed on what other people doing

You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.

In front of the camera and in front of the lens, there's no lawsuits, there's no agent, and there's most frequently no time limits... There's a longevity that's kind of built into it. I spend most of my time behind the scenes, and when it is time to perform, I'm genuinely delighted to do it.

I used to have a drug problem, but now I have enough money.

The most important part of any rock song is the guitar solo.

The problem with self-improvement is knowing when to quit.

If you want to split a bottle with a friend, then Sammy Hagar is your guy. If you want to split your friend with a bottle than give me a call.

I just wanted to be in show biz. I wanted to make music and sing and dance, tell jokes and stories, make ya smile, make ya cry - and charge you $ 8.50

The perfect woman has an IQ of 150, wants to make love until 4 in the morning, then turns into a pizza!

I would just like to say that after all these years of heavy drinking, bright lights and late nights, I still don't need glasses. I drink right out of the bottle.

I don't get all the women that I want... I get all the women that want me.

Of course building a kitchen makes all the symmetric sense in the world because everybody's burning calories at 120 beats a minute. You could even register it on a graph at the DJ booth. "How fast are they burning calories, sir?" "126 a minute." "Are you sure?" "Oh, I'm very sure." You can meter that out.

I can teach you to jump up in five seconds-it takes years to learn how to land properly.

The world's a stage, and I want the brightest spot.

You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.

Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken!

It dont matter WHAT your doin, ust as long as you LOOK GOOD doin it

It doesn't matter the kind of music, it doesn't matter whether it's a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don't care if it's outer space or pop, the spirit is the same.

They make this drink in Brazil Called cachaca. It's sugar can alcholho. Costs 35 cents a quart. One quart of that stuff and you see God. Two quarts and you graow a pair of tight pants and an electric guitar.

You want a hero in the music world? James Brown. He brought a feeling to music without really using words. He's just famous for his sound.

I take my personal upkeep real seriously; my sense of organization and attention to detail; my memory; my business - I love the business.

I'm a family man. I personally started 3 or 4 families last year.

Critics like Elvis Costello because critics are like Elvis Costello.

When I die, sprinkle my ashes over the 80's.

Music is like girlfriends to me; I'm continually astonished by the choices other people make.

You want to know if we're animals? When I'm on stage with the volume rippling my body like a glass of water and thousands of people are generating heat in my direction, there's no time for thought. My basement facilities take over completely. Sure it's animal. People might like to talk about art, but look where art is, in the gutter.

Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.

The travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you're doing. You are really called into service - and it's the service industry man, it's blue collar man, I'm sweating by the second song. It's construction work from that second song on.

Somebody asked me the question not too long ago: 'Dave, do you think the music business has turned corrupt.' I said: 'Absolutely not - it has always been corrupt.'

I'm not conceited. Conceit is a fault and I have no faults.

I think the two most difficult things to deal with in life are failure and success

I know that people think I'm a party king; but, face it, if I finished the bottle every time I took a drink, I wouldn't be able to do the aerials I do onstage.

I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.

I've always been very self-motivated.

A lot of rock bands are truly a legend in their own minds.

I am a one-trick pony. If you tell most people to draw a picture of a tree, they'd draw 35 branches and 10,000 leaves. I will draw you a tree with four branches and three leaves, and I'll spend the rest of the week drawing inside of each leaf. In terms of the grand gesture, I reserve that maximum turbo blast energy for what I do as an artist, and I sing and dance for dinner.

Give me a glazed doughnut, and a bottle of anything... to go!

I always wanted to be an outrage to public decency and a threat to women. And this is one of the few occupations where you're not only allowed that, but you're encouraged.

I change as the times change. I'm a reflection of what's around me without trying at all.

Audience participation should extend from on-stage to backstage to under the stage

People say that life is a cesspool of darkness and dispair. Well we of Van Halen are sailing through it in a yacht!

A song without a hook is like a train without rails. It skitters all over the place, bangs into everything. Boom! Crash! There goes Grand Central Station. Crushed by a train.

Women are great. When they dig you, there's nothing they won't do. That kind of loyalty is hard to find - unless you've got a good dog.

Classic Van Halen made people want to dance and f**k. Modern Van Halen makes you want to drink milk and drive foreign cars.

You stick your head above the crowd and attract attention and sometimes somebody will throw a rock at you. That's the territory. You buy the land, you get the Indians.

I believe more and more that this business is about people. People, people. The idea is to make friends at the retail level, the warehouse level, let people see you exist, can form sentences and have an interest in something other than yourself.

Let's play with the career, if we can't find anything else to do

We've all got out self-destructive bad habits, the trick is to find four or five you personally like the best and just do those all the time.

I grew up on radio, not TV.

I live and breathe and do four times as much four times as fast as anyone else.

Radio as we know it is pretty much changing completely.

If you put a Van Halen album in your record collection, it will melt all the rest of your records.

My ambition is to further create a signature sound, a signature spirit, that makes some kind of contribution to music in general.

Nobody's going to get a hot dog at my concert!

You know what rock musicians are? They are hung up, neurotic, over-weight hippies with sex problems.

I'm gonna abandon my spirit to them, which is actually what I attempt to do. You work yourself up into that state and you fall in supplication of the demon gods.

I knew already when I was seven years old, that I wanted to be on stage and entertain people. I sell laughs. Here, you got one for free!

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

It's not who wants to sleep with you; It's who wants to sleep with you again.

There are only so many letters in the alphabet. When I talk to young musicians or authors and they ask for advice, I say, You gotta learn all the letters of your own personal alphabet. With music, you need to know all the different kinds of music and everything in and around your given instrument.

Ya know, I always admired Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's. Ray had a vision of the most commonplace thing - a hamburger and fries to go - but to him it was just the greatest thing ever, and he was going to make it the greatest thing ever for everybody else, and he did.

My visions and fantasies are pretty standard. The only difference is I got to do it, while most of us haven't. Beyond that, I'm a pretty standard guy. Give me a gal with a sense of humor, acidic wit, who's read a few books and has a body like a Swedish speed skater, and I'm quite content.

Rock & roll is not so much a question of electric guitars as it is striped pants.

I'm a natural behind the camera... My attentions are more toward behind the scenes, more toward creating, producing, and directing what's going on here... When I finally do pop in front of the lens, I'm genuinely glad and relieved to be there.

When you get something like MTV, it's like regular television. You get it, and at first it's novel and brand new and then you watch every channel, every show. And then you become a little more selective and more selective, until ultimately... you wind up with a radio.

The only people who put iced tea in Jack Daniel's bottles is the Clash baby!

Remember, life is just a game and no one gets out alive

Self-tragedy is always a great way to dramatize yourself - ask any teenager.

I'm a family oriented guy; I've personally started four or five this year.

For the last 30 years, I've been leading a life of crime and international intrigue that's involved 40 stamps in my passport, love affairs, and broken hearts to go with each one of them. You would have to live three lifetimes to catch up with just the allegations that follow me!

The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train.

I think very frequently, musicians become a victim of every song they sing. I like all kinds of recreation. It's aggressive. I want to be part of everything.

On parties it's not about who you are. The real reason to which a party revolves is how good you look.

In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you're down below 14th Street in New York City, that's bohemian; that's left-wing.

Stick your head above the crowd and eventually somebody will throw a rock at it.