"I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre."

"I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion."

"I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green."

"The biggest problem for me was feeling that as I became more balanced and a better man that I wouldn't have the fire to create from."

"The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it."

"A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier."

"On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger."

"Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex."