Top 97 Quotes & Sayings by David Lee Roth - Page 2

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

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

Critics like Elvis Costello because critics are like Elvis Costello.

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.

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

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.'

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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