Best quotes by Dave Grohl

I think the producers or whoever's doing the show are tripping so hard. They must be on acid. They live in this, like, weird grass mound and there's this 'sun' in the sky with this little baby's face that's just, like, bleaaargh-aarghagh. It's just so totally insane. It's such an acid thing, man. For kids!

I'm a skinny, geeky, high school dropout - it works, kids! Sensitive guys always get the girl. You'll get laid 10 times as much as that guy on the football team 'cause he's on steroids and he's gonna get fat.

Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

To me the most important thing is getting into a studio and making an album that is 12 or 14 amazing songs, getting up onstage, and making people happy by livening the rock.

It's a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that's a good thing. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

Rock stars are like sports stars: If you snap your ankle, you're done.

The best time for gum is just before getting onstage. I need a minty-fresh microphone.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it's just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Everybody now thinks that Nashville is the coolest city in America.

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.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends, family.

It's important to me that people feel connected to the band through the music, you know? I don't want it to be wallpaper. I don't want it to be background music. I want it to be clear: This is the song. These are the words. If you feel the same way as I do, sing it as loud as you can.

There's nothing better than having a bottle of beer in your hand in the waves.

Dude, maybe not everyone loves 'Glee.' Me included. I watched 10 minutes and it wasn't my thing.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap - and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and 'Heart Shaped Box' and stuff on 'In Utero' just happened that way.

The whole slacker generation totally didn't apply to us musically.

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. But we're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing - we missed getting in the van, loading our equipment, and watching it break down in the middle of a show. And that feeling hasn't gone away. There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.

Someone curating songs for you through your computer or being able to hold 10,000 songs on your watch - that convenience is pretty incredible, but so is the emotional impact of holding a Beatles record in your hand and listening to Let It Be.

If you were to sit me down in a classroom, with fluorescent lights humming and some woman trying to teach me Italian, there's no way. But scream goes to Italy, we stay in a squat, and the only way you can ask someone where to take a piss is to do it in Italian. So I learned Italian.

After 10 years, I have been touring for 20, playing basically the same type of music, a four-piece or three-piece type of music with loud, crashing drums and screaming vocals. It gets to the point where you're looking for something new, and you don't want to do something that's way too left-field, for fear that it might seem contrived.

To women, drummers seem like these adorable, sexy Neanderthals, and 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.

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

For every Foo Fighters record, we've had two or three beautiful, acoustic-based songs, but they never usually make their way to the record, because we want to make rock records.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them.

My first instrument was actually the trombone, but that didn't last long. Soon I was playing guitar in bands from the time I was 11 or 12.

When you're recording to tape, you usually just settle for what you have. There's not a lot of options to manipulate the performance.

CBGB represents a lot to New York City and to underground rock and to new wave and post-punk and whatever. But, you know, it's like tearing down the Jefferson Memorial or something.

I guess it was exciting that every time I pulled up to the gate of my house, I wondered if someone was going to jump out of the bush and stab me in the face.

I think maybe what happened was the convenience of technology overshadowed the experience of holding an album in your hands, and sitting on your bedroom floor, and staring at a picture of John Lennon or Gene Simmons or Johnny Rotten. That tangible experience can sometimes become an even more emotional experience, because it's really happening.

CBGB was a wild place, ... The first time I ever played there was in 1987, I think, with my hardcore band, Scream. And I remember the craziest [thing] about that club was you could be in front of the stage and it could be louder than any show you've ever been to in your life. But if you were towards the back of the club at the bar, you could sit and have a conversation with someone. It was the weirdest thing to me.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn't very good-looking. But in his own way he'd always save the day.

Most of our songs were written on acoustic guitar before they made it to the practice stage.

How come drummers leave their drumsticks on the dashboard of their car? So they can park in the handicapped spaces.

Who's to say what's a good voice and not a good voice?

It's nice when people are happy to hear that you're still alive, rather than feeling like "Oh, finally he's dead?"

When I sit down to interview people, I don't hold questions and I don't know the answers. They're more like conversations that become lessons.

I dropped out of high school and I couldn't go to college 'cause I wasn't smart enough, so I'd resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.

I'm not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

Actually, I didn't start sweating until I had children.

I hate the solo artist aspect of rock-'n'-roll. I don't have enough personality or charisma to be a solo star.

When it comes to making an album I take that very seriously. I am meticulous, overworked. That's my time to put everything under the microscope.

I'm big on taking the lady out to dinner. We have some candlelight romance every now and then. And our whole family is within a 6-mile radius. It's disgustingly domestic. I'm big on Costco.

There's a reason why the Foo Fighters don't blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that's hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn't really come up, or it just hasn't felt right.

When I was a teenager, working towards dropping out of high school to starting to tour with bands, I'd drive around in my VW Bug every morning before school, very stoned listening over and over to Zeppelin. This song got to me because it just seemed mystical. There is something about those Celtic tunings that almost sounds Eastern. Somehow it would sweep me up into my own little trance-like state, like Sting with those shamans in the Amazon. But all I had was a bong and a Led Zeppelin cassette.

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

I think actually singing the words is more therapeutic than just sitting down to write them, because then you are letting it out, and it's coming from your gut.

We just do what we always do. We play shows and go home and rest and then play more shows.

Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads.

It’s every band’s right, you shouldn’t have to do f___ing Glee. And then the guy who created Glee is so offended that we’re not, like, begging to be on his f___ing show… f___ that guy for thinking anybody and everybody should want to do Glee.

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of school. Give me something to assemble, I won't look at the directions, I'll try to figure it out by myself. It's why I love Ikea furniture.

There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.

It's terrifying to play your favorite band's song in front of your favorite band.

If you're trying to connect to people with music - it's more of an outward process and a lot of times musicians can be very inward.

There's a band in a garage right now writing songs for an album that will do the same thing 'Nevermind' did some 20 years ago. We don't know who and where, but it will f***ing happen again. All it takes is for that storm to break.

It's tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I'm wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America - land of the free, home of the brave.

I'm kind of claustrophobic... It's not even like enclosed spaces. It's like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can't get out.

I'd like to imagine I won't end up in Hell, but I think I've done too much acid and listened to too much death metal to sit on a cloud next to God with angels floating above my head.

What I really miss these days in music - is the music. I prefer to listen to melodies and songs, not just sounds.

Going out and playing music - that's what I do. I don't do much else.

There are times when I feel like I'm a traveling minister. I'm trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.

With this record [The Colour and the Shape], I started taking the lyrics more seriously. This is a very personal album.

I'm so not macho. It's crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they're stuck in that safe place.

People should never be afraid that Foo Fighters are ever going to break up, it's like your grandparents getting divorced - it's not gonna happen.

From the time that 'Nevermind' came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

I think musicians like me are drawn to those older desks, not just because they're legend and lore but also because they do something really specific that is hard to emulate or re-create digitally.

When you're sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

My whole life, I have listened to people like Neil Young, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, and artists that have made a career out of the mellow, folky, acoustic dynamic.

'Some Kind Of Monster' is such a nightmare for any musician to watch because you're watching a band be honest to each other. Not a good idea, man!

There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

Joining a band without ever having really met the people before, you just want to be musically powerful.