Best 79 quotes of David Lee Roth on MyQuotes

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

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.

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

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?

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I've always been very self-motivated.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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!