Bruce Dickinson Quotes

There are basically two categories of music: Metal and bullshit.

If heavy metal bands ruled the world, we'd be a lot better off.

We're better than Metallica. We're better musicians, better players. Put it this way, they can try to walk onstage after an Iron Maiden show if they want.

I find that fencing and training give me more stamina and help me deal with the craziness of being on the road so much.

Life is too short to do the things you don't love doing.

Iron Maiden is an institution, and I'm delighted that I'm involved in it, but there was a time that I wasn't delighted so I quit.

Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.

I think the best way to find out about something is to try to do it to the max. A lot of people take up a hobby or sport and then find an excuse not to carry on with it. Once I start something, I won't stop until I'm as good at it as I'll ever be.

Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

I don't have interns. I don't have a manager. I don't have assistants. I don't have a secretary. I can't figure out Outlook Express. I'm the worst person in the world answering e-mails, and my phone is probably the oldest, most battered phone you can find. So I just talk to people.

Rock music should be gross: that's the fun of it. It gets up and drops its trousers.

Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change

My dad always told me, 'I don't care what you do. Just aim to be the best at it. Even if it's the world's best window cleaner.'

If your only arbiter of anything is money, really you should... go and rob banks.

Fly, on your way, like an eagle / Fly as high as the Sun.

Best two rock voices I've heard in a last few years both have been from grunge bands: it's Eddie Vedder and the other one is Chris Cornell from Soundgarden.

If you really want to annoy me, ask me when I'm going to retire from rock n' roll.

Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you'll have an engineer for life.

I never intended to become a professional pilot. But, as I became more curious about aircraft, and, well, not being John Travolta, I realized that the only way I was ever going to fly a jet is if I got a job.

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

Engineering stimulates the mind.

Business is just about enabling human beings, nothing more, nothing less. Businesses need to recognize this fundamental fact.

You can sail in the desert with a ship of fools. You can smuggle in Moses and his book of rules. But you can't take a mother and give her back her son. What kind of freedom is bought with a gun? People like to build their prison walls when they're afraid to look inside... a thousand points of light are the muzzle flashes in the night. And the freedoms you profess to hold won't bring the dead back from the cold.

Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative.

When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don't do songs from outside people.

When I was in employment as a regular line pilot, I used to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden. I got lucky - they let me off

A few of these interviews have gone slightly awry, because every now and again there has been the odd conflict of interest between interviews because of the Iron Maiden record, and I am a bit long-winded.

I shall refract myself, yes, I shall no longer be known as the prism.

Apart from death and taxes, the one thing that's certain in this life is that I'll never be a fashion icon.

My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.”

Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.

The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan - what's she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair.

The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.

I guess it was the first time I really thought about leaving. I don't just mean Iron Maiden, I mean quitting music altogether. I just thought, 'Nothing is worth feeling like this for.' I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig.

In the days when Glastonbury was an alternative festival, it was quite interesting. Now it is the most bourgeois thing on the planet ... we'll leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury and the rest of the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth and drink a lot of beer and have fun.

It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "Fear of the Dark. Favorite Album." What?!?

Major labels blow all their money massively and blame it on the band.

I'm very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.

Anybody auditions for X-Factor it's because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.

I'm trying to be as green as I can. As an airline pilot, I have a carbon footprint that's a size 10, so it's pretty hard.

The more guitars we have onstage the better, as I'm concerned.

A guy called Arthur Brown... was a big influence of mine... and also Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull.

Teachers need to be more inspirational. But it's also up to engineering to make itself more interesting.

In my naïvety, I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea.

One of my earliest ventures was when I was nine years old. I realized there was a shortage of pencils at school, so I started Rent-a-Pencil. But I made a fundamental mistake. Everybody stole my pencils.

If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.

King in Crimson is actually an alchemical term. King Crimson is a metaphor for Devil or Satan, but at the same time it's also a metaphor for one of the statures in the purification of man and the purification of mankind soul towards union with God and with Infinite, which is the philosophical aim of alchemists.

With the Internet, bands can come and go every five minutes and the music looks disposable.

I was an accident - my mum was only 16 when she had me.

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.