Best quotes by Dave Grohl

No one is you, and that is your power.

If you play a Nickleback song backwards you'll hear messages from the devil. Even worse, if you play it forwards you'll hear Nickleback.

Always have the highest bar for yourself. Wake up everyday and no matter how crappy you feel, want to change something for the better. Do something that makes someone happy. Create something that inspires someone. Be someone's light when they are hopeless.

That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.

You will only be great at things you love to do don't pursue a career in something you hate to do.

Be someone's light when they are hopeless.

I think that if you're passionate about something and you're driven and you're focused, then you can pretty much do anything that you want to do in life.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

You look up to your heroes and you shouldn't be intimidated by them; you should be inspired by them.

How do I stay humble? Because I'm the best at being humble.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine - it kinda sucks the life out of music.

Nickelback walks into a bar...there's no punchline because ruining music isn't funny.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can't replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

Wow, I get to wake up again? Ok. You have to make good with what you've got.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.

There's some things in life that you really consider to be priceless.

The human element of making music is what's most important.

Don't look at the poster on your wall and think 'I could never do that.' Look at the poster on your wall and think 'I'm gonna do that!'

To women, drummers seem like these adorable, sexy Neanderthals, but lead singers seem mysterious and dangerous. So while the lead singers all want to be David Bowie, floating into parties and being the center of attention, it's the drummers who are in the corner doing keg stands and breaking tables. Usually it's the drummers who get the fun-loving ladies and the singers who get the nutcases.

Never lose faith in real rock and roll music. Never lose faith in that. You might have to look a little harder, but it's always going to be there.

What we feel most comfortable doing is playing loud, screaming rock songs.

When there's so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you've already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?

Just the other day someone threw a bra duct-taped to a tennis ball. I just stood there, playing guitar, thinking how this was totally premeditated. Some girl sat around inventing a way to get her bra onstage from 40 rows back.

It's not until recently that I could even imagine myself as an adult. But these kids today, they look at me like I'm Neil Young. Nirvana is the band their parents listen to.

I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it'd take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn't want to retreat.

As I get older... I start to realize that life ain't half bad. Each year, I'm amazed that I'm still alive. I don't take any of this for granted, I'm a lucky dude.

The most important thing for me is my family, and my health and happiness, and making sure everyone's cool.

There's something about heartbreak that makes for great music, but the same could be said for Jägermeister. Hangovers make for great music, too.

When something good comes your way, you better feel fortunate, because it doesn't last forever.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's gathering people together to do something fun.

There's always gonna be rock n' roll bands, there's always gonna be kids that love rock n' roll records, and there will always be rock n' roll.

When you're young, you're not afraid of what comes next. You're excited by it.

Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury. I consider him the greatest frontman of all time. Like, it's funny? You'd imagine that Freddie was more than human, but... You know how he controlled Wembley Stadium at Live Aid in 1985? He stood up there and did his vocal warm ups with the audience. Something that intimate, where they realize, 'Oh yeah, he's just a f***ing dude.'

Most people don't take some things into consideration. When they hear an album, they hear the artist or they hear the lyric or they hear the melody. But they don't really think about the environment in which it was recorded, which is so important. It's that thing that determines what the album sounds like.

I had never been in charge of anything. I'd always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I'd never been in charge of an organization.

I don't think of Kurt as 'Kurt Cobain from Nirvana'. I think of him as 'Kurt'. It's something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I've never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.

Nothing's going to keep me from making music. If I were in the want-ads in the back of the paper or playing to six people at a coffee shop, I'd still love to make music.

At school where you a dunce or a teacher's pet? All of the above. I was stupid so they thought I was cute.

I've experienced great things, I've experienced great tragedies. I've done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there's more.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

It was supposed to be gross, and now it's gorgeous.

There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that 'Everlong' is on it, or 'Best of You' is on it, and it's really special.

It's funny, there aren't too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There's a few - the really brilliant ones.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

When you're thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

There's a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

I'd love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

Always have the highest bar for yourself.

One of the great things about Taylor Hawkins is his…shirtless body, really.

We only do what feels right. If something feels forced or contrived, then we pull back. We remain the Foo Fighters.

From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That's what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don't. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He's a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down.

The fact that I'm virtually deaf. Any woman who's going to date a rock musician has to be prepared to repeat herself every 10 seconds. My wife asks me where we should go for dinner and it sounds like the schoolteacher from Charlie Brown.

Mom, thanks for letting me drop out of high school. Haha!

I once received a cape that was made from the little purple bags that Crown Royal Whisky comes in.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

If it weren't for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

I listen to boy band music before I have to fire someone.

I think I'm scared a lot. I'm scared of almost everything. And I'm constantly trying to work my way through each obstacle, whether it's a present, past, or future relationship.

Develop that individuality by working as hard as you can at what you love.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do. It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].

Ramones or AC/DC are two bands that have managed to keep their signature sound and their signature formula for years and years and album after album after album, without it seeming like a dead-end street.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can't let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn't even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

Being in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life.

What's the last thing a drummer says in a band? 'Hey guys, why don't we try one of my songs?'

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer - I don't know if they'd ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there's old luggage, a couple of bikes. It's big enough to put one minivan in. That's it. No dartboard. I'm so not macho.