Ozzie Quotes

Out of everything I've lost, I miss my mind the most!

Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!

That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, ‘Ozzy, I think my house is haunted!’ ‘Sell tickets then,’ I told him, and put the phone down.

The funny thing about GPS was it didn’t always send you in the right direction. I knew that if I took a right and took Twelfth instead, I’d get there faster, so I turned right. Ozzy did not approve. “Wut the foock?

Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate.

If he had to have strange powers, Aden wished they could have been more like hers. That voodoo voice would have made his life a lot easier; he could have sent certain people (cough Ozzie cough) away with no memory of him.

Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it.

I love you all; I love you more than life itself, but you're all fucking mad.

It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome.

We're talking about humans inhaling the toxic life force sucked out of a demon from another world.' Quite possible the weirdest sentence I'd ever said aloud...'And according to your mom, if they survive addiction-and that's a big if-their scrambled brains'll make Ozzy Osbourne look rational and coherent.

I keep hearing this fucking thing that guns don't kill people, but people kill people. If that's the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?

I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training – they just are.

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

And when I was in the trunk, I saw Jesus. And the Virgin Mary. And Ozzy Osbourne.

You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan.

What was Dionysus going to go? Send him back to his hellish isolation? He’d been there, done that, and had the Ozzy T-shirt to prove it.’ (Styxx)

When you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone.

I used to get upset by people not understanding me, but I’ve made a career out of it now.

I started to put my phone back in my bag when Ozzy yelled out, his accent so thick, I was only half certain he said, "Where the foock are ya goin'?" Uncle Bob jumped. I must've turned on my GPS. "You have to tahn the foock around. You're in the middle of foockin' nowhere." "What the hell is that?" Uncle Bob asked, almost swerving off the road. "Sorry, it's Ozzy." I grabbed my phone and turned down the volume. "He's so demanding." I pushed a few buttons to turn off the app, then put the phone to my ear. "Sweet, buttermilk pancakes, Ozzy, you have to stop calling me. You're a married man!" I pretended to hang up, then rolled my eyes. "Rock stars.

The funny thing about GPS was it didn’t always send you in the right direction. I knew that if I took a right and took Twelfth instead, I’d get there faster, so I turned right. Ozzy did not approve. “Wut the foock?” Did he just say the F-word? “Ya not even foocking listening.” “Ha! This is great,” I said to the dead naked guy. He ignored me. Ozzy was so entertaining

What can go wrong will go wrong.

I remember saying to Tony [Iommi], ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’ Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’

They said I would never write this book. Well, f**k ’em – ’cos here it is. All I have to do now is remember something... Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.

Pink Floyd was music for rich college kids, and we were the exact f**king opposite of that.

It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people.

I made more money out of writing those four songs for Ozzy than I made out of fifteen years of Motörhead – ludicrous, isn’t it!

Yeah his being Sumerian to this group would go over like an Ozzy Osbourne/Marilyn Manson duet at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting. He might as well be wearing a shit that said “Kibbles and Bits,” with a heavy emphasis on the “bits” part...

The funny thing is, I was never much of a fighter. Better a live coward than a dead hero, that was my motto.

We thought we had elevated animal behavior to an art form. But then we met Ozzy.

My father always said I would do something big one day.‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me, after he’d had a few beers.‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’ And he was right, my old man. I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.

The most unbelievable thing about my behaviour is that I was convinced it was entirely f**king normal.

The power of people, when they focus on something positive, never fails to amaze me.

Wind is renewable. Turbines are not.

The ferret sat and examined his foot "What in the world am I?" he asked, alarmed "I look like some sort of rodent!

Peace is not an easy prospect--it requires greater bravery than does conflict.

I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn’t mine, that’s for sure.

Tell me I'm a sinner I got news for you I spoke to God this morning and he don't like you! Don't you try and teach me no original sin; I don't need your pity for the shape I'm in

‘Ozzy, why do you drink so much? What’s the point?’ The right answer to that question was: because I’m an alcoholic; because I have an addictive personality; because whatever I do, I do it addictively. But I didn’t know any of that back then.

You can never take the violence back.

In 1964 something totally unexpected happened. I got a job I enjoyed.

You’ve got to try and take things to the next level, or you’ll just get stuck in a rut.

They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.

‘Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?’ he asked me. ‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘It’s true.’ ‘Shit, man,’ he said. ‘We piss on it every night on our way home.’

‘Wow, dude, come in,’ said Tommy [Lee], when I rang the door-bell. ‘I can’t believe it. Ozzy Osbourne’s in my house.’

I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming.

'OSBOURNE!’ he shouted. ‘YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO YOURSELF AND TO THIS SCHOOL. BRING ME A SHOE.’ The room went so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart.

Truths are as much a matter of questions as answers.

Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just f**king vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say.

I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse at least once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy, putrid f**king business.

Ozzie Boone...insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.

Officially, we didn’t have a band leader. Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony [Iommi].

No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do.

Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews.

But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous – we were already halfway there.

All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better.

I hated school. Hated it.

The Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’ One time, I made my own sign – a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’ – and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

I grew up having to piss in a bucket ’cos there was no indoor shitter, and now I have these computerised Japanese super-loo things that have heated seats and wash and blow-dry your arse at the touch of a button. Give it a couple of years and I’ll have a bog with a robot arm that pulls out my turds, so I don’t have to strain.

‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony [Iommi],’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’ He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists. Not like Tony.

But one of the many problems with being an alcoholic is that when people tell you how bad you are when you’re drunk, you’re usually drunk. So you just keep getting drunk.

I don’t think we [Black Sabbath] ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews.

I didn’t have a clue what love was about until I met Sharon.

I wasn’t exactly much fun to be around. Being with me was like falling into an abyss.

I always thought that whatever I had was temporary.

Nothing more, nothing less...

In the words of Ozzy Osbourne, I’m going off the rails on a crazy train. And crazy never felt so good.

I was going off the rails on a crazy train. You could practically hear Ozzy screaming “All aboard!” Don

Man, y'all make the Addams family look like Ozzie and Harriet."(Annie)

The way I was boozing was a kind of suicide. It was only gonna be a matter of time.

Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon disposal. Though when it comes to the largest mass-produced battery-powered gadget ever created—the electric car—environmentalists cannot jump from their seats fast enough to applaud it.

At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban ‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, ’cos Romeo and Juliet’s about suicide, too.

I don’t have anything bad to say about the guy they hired to replace me, Ronnie James Dio, who’d previously been with Rainbow. He’s a great singer. Then again, he ain’t me, and I ain’t him. So I just wish they’d called the band Black Sabbath II.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, `What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature.

One kid at school who never beat me up was Tony Iommi. He was in the year above me, and everyone knew him ’cos he could play the guitar.

I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, ‘Sorry, we want subjects, not objects'.

As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.

Creativity thrives where its roots are crowded.

Shock is a very weird thing.

My wife can sniff out a lie from six thousand miles away. And I’m the world’s worst liar, anyway.

Y’know, swearing is just part of who we are – we’re forever effing and blinding.

I have the greatest respect for Tony Iommi.

I’d always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.

Mind you, no one who lives in the real world spends the whole time going around saying, ‘Oh yes,darling, I understand, let’s talk about our “feelings”, lah-dee-f**king-dah.’ People who say they’ve never had a cross word are living on another f**king planet.

Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it," he instructed before I began to write, "because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said, ‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’

You never really know what’s going on inside Tony Iommi’s head. He’s the total opposite of me, in other words: no one’s ever in any doubt about what’s going on in the pile of old jelly inside my thick skull.

All these polo-necked wankers from grammar schools were going out and buying songs like ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. Flowers in your hair? Do me a f**king favour. [...] Who gave a dog’s arse about what people were doing in San Francisco, anyway? The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones they threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of fifty-three ’cos you’d worked yourself to death. I hated those hippy-dippy songs, man. Really hated them.

The bullet smashed through the right lens of Winston’s glasses and slammed him back against the lounge wall. Ozzy was expressionless as his old friend slid down the wall leaving a smear of red behind him. Above his creased body, a gob of pale tissue clung onto the light switch. “Aw, Winston,” he said, “you did have a brain after all!

My favourite prank in heavy metalwork was to get a penny and spend three or four minutes making it really hot with a blowtorch, and then leave it on Mr Lane’s desk, so that he’d see it and pick it up out of curiosity. First you’d hear: ‘Waaaaahhhhhh!’ Then: ‘Osbourne, you little bastard!’ Heh-heh-heh. The old hot-penny trick. Priceless, man.

I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said: John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern. Signed, Mr Oldham (Headmaster) That was f**king it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour.

Randy [Rhoads] was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

If one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not, in fact, his friends. How else would one learn to avoid saying those things that would elicit laughter from strangers? The mockery of friends is affectionate and inoculates against foolishness. ~Little Ozzie

Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it's something.

Bands like The Move, Traffic and The Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful.

I was a free man, and I’d survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp. So how come I felt so f**king sad?

We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years.

On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale. I felt like I’d just been born. But the critics f**king hated it.

I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip. It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag.

And if it wasn’t as good as before, what was the point of doing it? There wasn’t a point, as far as I was concerned.

Delilah was fun. Ozzie was fun. Mac was…not-fun…unfun?

After a real snake ended up on stage one night, it was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was.

‘Someone’s gonna die before this is over,’ I said to Doc McGhee. [...] ‘I don’t think someone’s gonna die, Ozzy. I think we’re all gonna die.’

The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-f**king-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.

I’d always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn’t have the dough to buy me one, and I didn’t have the patience to learn anyway. My attention span was five seconds.

‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly. ‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door. ‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said. [...] ‘Halløj?’ I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'

You don’t have to believe in God to do the programme. You just have to accept that there’s a higher power – it could be the lamp in the corner of the room, for all they care. Some people use nature, the ocean, their d**k – whatever comes to mind.

Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there's savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed...all here in Pico Mundo." "And we call her Mother Nature." "There's nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either," Ozzie said.

I remember coming to in white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, F**k, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed. Pssst, pssst. I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of „Bark at the Moon“. ‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked. ‘F**k off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’

There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practised the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’

If you’re determined to commit suicide, you’ll blow your brains out or you’ll jump off a tall building. You’ll do something that you can’t take back, in other words. When you ‘try to kill yourself’ by taking too many pills – like I did – you know you’re probably gonna get found by someone. So all you’re doing is sending a message.

It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, 'Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.'

If you don’t have a sense of humour when you’re in a band, you end up like f**king Emerson, Lake and Palmer, making eight-disc LPs so you can all have your own three-hour f**king solos. And who wants to listen to that bollocks?

Apart from Tony Iommi – who I’d never seen again since leaving school – I didn’t even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I’d look the part. The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a f**king bastard.

I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature – especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean, if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half Jewish?

Even now, I have a lot of trouble understanding why Sharon stayed – or why she married me in the first place, come to think of it. I mean, she was actually afraid of me half the time. And the truth was I was afraid of me, too. Afraid of what I’d do to myself or, even worse, to someone else.

Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.

When I slept outside in winter, it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.

I’m no good with business, me. I’m the last person to ask when it comes to contracts and dough and all that.

I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said bon voyage. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.'

As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right.

It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child.

I loved being a dad. It’s just so much fun watching these little people you’ve brought into the world as they develop and grow up.

When I was growing up, no one ever recovered from cancer. I mean, the doc would always tell you it was survivable, but everyone knew that was just bullshit to calm you down.

But life’s never that easy, is it? Even the calmest, bluest ocean has a turd bobbing around in it somewhere. And there was a massive one headed right for me.

Never in a million years did I think I’d end up making a career out of singing. I didn’t think it was possible. As far as I knew, the only way I could make any dough was to go and work in a factory, like everyone else in Aston. Or rob a f**king bank.

One day Sharon got a call from Greta Van Susteren, one of the anchors at Fox News. ‘I was wondering if you and Ozzy wanted to have dinner next week with the President of the United States,’ she said. ‘Is he in trouble again?’ asked Sharon. Greta laughed. ‘Not that I know of, no.’ ‘Thank God for that.’ ‘Will you come?’ ‘Of course we will. It would be an honour.’ When Sharon told me, I couldn’t believe it. I always thought I’d be on a ‘Wanted’ poster on the Oval Office wall, not invited over for tea.

Taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just f**king ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again – amazingly – but because I was asked to play a gig there.

Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

Some thirteen-year-old with a sticker-covered guitar might right now be in a garage in Denton, Texas, or Peoria, Illinois, or Macon, Georgia, writing an album that could one day flip the world upside down.

Sharon saved my life, Sharon is my life, and I love her. And I was terrified that I was going to lose her. But as much as I wanted everything to be normal and right, I was terribly sick, physically and mentally.

Going on stage was like being at a butchers’ convention. And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor’ our gigs. The crew would f**k with them all the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, Ozzy’s going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won’t sing a note until they’ve all been slaughtered.’ The ASPCA believed every word of it.

Like my father always said to me, if you ever pull a weapon on somebody – no matter what it is – you’ve got to be fully prepared to use it, because if you’re not, the other guy will see the doubt in your eyes, and he’ll take it off you and use it on you instead. Then you’re really in trouble.

I stomped down the hallway, twisted the latch on the front door, and yanked it open. ‘Are you… “Ozzy Zig”?’ said Guy Fawkes, in a thick Brummie accent. ‘Who wants to know?’ I said, folding my arms. ‘Terry Butler,’ he said. ‘I saw your ad.’ That was exactly what I’d hoped he was going to say. Truth was, I’d been waiting a long time for this moment. I’d dreamed about it. I’d fantasised about it. I’d had conversations with myself on the shitter about it. One day, I thought, people might write newspaper articles about my ad in the window of Ringway Music, saying it was the turning point in the life of John Michael Osbourne, ex-car horn tuner. ‘Tell me, Mr Osbourne,’ I’d be asked by Robin Day on the BBC, ‘when you were growing up in Aston, did you ever think that a simple advert in a music shop window would lead to you becoming the fifth member of the Beatles, and your sister Iris getting married to Paul McCartney?’ And I’d answer, ‘Never in a million years, Robin, never in a million years.’ It was a f**king awesome ad.

The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a f**king atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me.

It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order. I asked him why he did it once. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’

During the first break-in I grabbed a load of hangers and thought, 'Magic', I’ll be able to sell this stuff down the pub. But I’d forgotten to take a flashlight with me, and it turned out that the clothes I’d nicked were a bunch of babies’ bibs and toddlers’ underpants. I might as well have tried to sell a turd.

Yes, I’m the crazy rock’n’roller who bit the head off a bat and pissed on the Alamo, but I also have a son who likes to mess around with the settings on my telly, so when I make myself a nice pot of tea, put my feet up, and try to watch a programme on the History Channel, I can’t get the f**king thing to work. That kind of stuff blew people’s minds. I think they had this idea in their heads that when I wasn’t being arrested for public intoxication, I went to a cave and hung upside down, drinking snakes’ blood. But I’m like Coco the Clown, me: at the end of the day, I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.

‘All I can say is that I lost two of the greatest people in my life,’ I said, trying not to choke up. ‘But it ain’t gonna stop me because I’m about rock’n’roll, and rock’n’roll is for the people, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy [Rhoads] would have liked me to, and so would Rachel [Youngblood], and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock’n’roll.’

One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I’m no good at dealing with people dying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it – I know that everyone’s gotta go eventually – but I can’t help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many f**ked-up ways of leaving it.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new - millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same.

The thing is, I’ve never believed in feuds. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been angry with people. Very angry – with people like Patrick Meehan, or that lawyer who tried to bill me for a drink, or Bob Daisley. But I don’t hate them. And I don’t wish them any harm. I reckon hating someone is just a total f**king waste of time and effort. What do you get out of it in the end? Nothing. I’m not trying to come over like the Archangel Gabriel here. I just think that if you’re pissed off with someone, call them an arsehole, get it out of your system, and move on. It’s not like we’re on this earth very long.

The only good thing about having dyslexia is that dyslexics are usually very creative people, or so I’ve been told. We think in unusual ways. But it’s a very bad stigma to have, not being able to read like normal people can. To this day I wish I’d had a proper education. I think books are great, I do. To be able to lose yourself in a book is f**king phenomenal. Everyone should be able to do it. But I’ve been able to get through an entire book only a few times in my life. Every blue moon this thing in my head will release, and I’ll try to read as many books as I can, because when it closes up it goes straight back to the way it was, and I end up just sitting there, staring at Chinese.

I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.

Look for your heros in the books people write, not in the people who write books.

Reviews? Didn’t read ’em.

Five kids in one lifetime ain’t bad – and I love them all so much. They’re the best things that ever happened to me, no question about it.

The worse I got, the more I worried that Sharon would leave me. And the more I worried, the worse I got.

That was the end of it. Lights out. For ever.

I’d been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour.

Aston (Be Sure to Wear Some Glass in Your Face)’.

What I couldn’t wrap my head around was why people were panic-buying toilet paper, not food. ‘Do they think we’re being attacked by an army of arseholes?

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test.” —Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation

I remembered I had tickets that Susan Blond gave me to the rock kid who ate the heads off bats, Ozzy Osbourne,...

Ozzy's cage is now sparkling but there is a problem. It seems that if you put vast quantities of sawdust down a toilet, the toilet stops working.

Steady had always suspected Ethan “Ozzie” Sykes, despite his constant joking and bad taste in eighties music, was one tough motherfucker.

I swear, if you don’t stop apologizing, I will listen to every Ozzy and Black Sabbath album I own.

Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?

He [dad] always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He’d have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he’d never go and see a doctor. He’d rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he’d never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.

I only remember fighting Ozzy O'Dell once. It was back in second grade. He threw these weird windmill-like punches, which was probably an early sign that the swim team was in his future.

A lot of people came up to me that night and asked, ‘How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?’ My answer was the same then as it is now: I’ve never stopped telling my wife that I love her; I’ve never stopped taking her out for dinner; I’ve never stopped surprising her with little gifts.

The only gig I can remember playing in those very early days — and I think it was with Rare Breed, but it could have been under a different name, with different band members, ’cos line-ups changed so often back then — was the Birmingham Fire Station’s Christmas party. The audience consisted of two firemen, a bucket and a ladder. We made enough dough for half a shandy (beer mixed with lemonade), split six ways.

‘Dad,’ said Jack one day. ‘When you’re on the telly, d’you think people are laughing with you or at you?’ The question had obviously been bothering him for a while. ‘Y’know what,’ I said to him, ‘as long as they’re laughing, I don’t care.’ ‘But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?’ ‘Because I’ve always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these years.’ And it’s true, y’know.

Call me Ozzie, doll,” he called back. He hunched over the keyboard like a starving man hunches over a plate of food. “And there’s no need to conceal my weapons. I figure everyone should see what’s in store for them should they attempt to fuck with me.”“ Oh man.” Dan groaned and rolled his eyes. “Next thing you know he’ll be coming to work shirtless with bandoliers strapped across his chest and a red bandana tied around his head.” “Ah, so you have seen a movie or two.” Ozzie swiveled in his chair, his eyes sparkling with devilish glee. “Rambo, huh? I can give you Rambo.” He lowered his voice. “‘They drew first blood. Not me…’” “What a crock of bullsh—uh, crap.” Dan scoffed. “Are you sitting there dissing Stallone?” Ozzie demanded, making like he was about to stand in defense of the Italian Stallion. “No. I’m sitting here dissing you, you stu—

I knew that I was loved completely, as long as I didn’t screw it up in the infinite number of ways it seemed possible to do so: stealing, lying, masturbating, listening to Ozzy Osbourne, or one day voting Democrat.

Aimee saw more of the world before her first birthday than most people do in a lifetime. I just wish I’d been sober for more of it. I was there physically, but not mentally. So I missed things you can never do over again: the first crawl, the first step, the first word. If I think about it for too long, it breaks my heart.

‘And what about a [band] name?’ said Tony [Iommi]. The three of us looked at each other. ‘We should all take a couple of days to think about it,’ I said. ‘I dunno about you two, but I’ve got a special place where I go to get ideas for important stuff like this. It’s never failed me yet.’ Forty-eight hours later I blurted out: ‘I’ve got it!’ ‘Must have been that dodgy bird you poked the other night,’ said Geezer. ‘Has your whelk turned green yet?’ Tony and Bill snickered into their plates of egg and chips. We were sitting in a greasy spoon caff in Aston. So far, everyone was getting along famously. ‘Very funny, Geezer,’ I said, waving an eggy fork at him. ‘I mean the name for our band.’ The snickering died down. ‘Go on then,’ said Tony [Iommi]. ‘Well, I was on the shitter last night, and...' ‘That’s your special place?’ spluttered Bill, blobs of mushed-up egg and HP sauce flying out of his mouth. ‘Where the f**k did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of f**king Babylon?

I’ve come to believe that everything in life is worked out in advance. So whenever bad shit happens, there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just gotta ride it out. And eventually death will come, like it comes to everyone.

’Welcome to New York,’ said the sign. [...] We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. [...] As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it. ‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’ ‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony [Iommi].

I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his [Bill Ward] house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’ ‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’ ‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’ ‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you d**k.’

My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life. [...] At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. [...] The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy – he was like a moose with a tracheotomy.

It’s just human nature – isn’t it? – to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?

Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester. The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us. ‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top. ‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him – but of course my tits are much smaller.’

Little Ozzie cried until he could cry no more. He could not have said just why he cried, but he cried because he knew, in some deep part of him where the knowledge would remain till he was dead, that the world was a more horrible place than he could imagine. He might think of monsters or mad dogs, but the world would beat him. It would turn the people he loved and trusted into monsters; it would reveal those meant to help him as mad dogs. He wept for himself, and he wept because he knew there would never really be anyone else to weep for him.

I was twenty now, and had given up all hope of being a singer or ever getting out of Aston. PA system or no PA system, it wasn’t going to happen. I’d convinced myself that there was no point in even trying, because I was just going to fail, like I had at school, at work, and at everything else I’d ever tried. ‘You ain’t no good as a singer,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t even play an instrument, so what hope d’you have?’

It’s not just that,” Chief Porter said. “A guy who once would have raped and killed a woman, now a lot of times he also has to cut off her lips and mail them to us or take her eyes for a souvenir and keep them in his freezer at home. There’s more flamboyant craziness these days.” Giving the buttered cinnamon roll a reprieve, Ozzie said, “Maybe it’s all these superhero movies with all their supervillains. Some psychopath who used to be satisfied raping and murdering, these days he thinks that he should be in a Batman movie, he wants to be the Joker or the Penguin.” “No real-life bad guy wants to be the Penguin,” I assured him. “Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people,” Chief Porter said, “but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense.

‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers. ‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’

It would be fair to say that the coppers in Amersham jail didn’t take much of a shine to me. My little dance, my little ego, it didn’t do me any favours in there. I wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, ‘Crazy Train’-singing rock’n’roll hero. All that celebrity shit counts for nothing with the Thames Valley Police.

All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious. But they just wanted to use me for publicity. And I suppose I didn’t care that much, ’cos every time they attacked me, I got my ugly mug on the telly and sold another hundred thousand records. I should probably have sent them a Christmas card.

The donkey nibbled on his butt. "What the hell!" Leaping a foot, Ozzie jerked around. The donkey was right THERE, not two inches from him, his ears laid back and his big brown eyes soulful. How had the damned thing moved so silently? "He's just being friendly." Marci shared that special smile that felt like a caress. "He likes you." Appalled, Ozzie said, "He likes my ass." And he backed out of the donkey's reach. "I do, too." No, no, no. He wasn't about to touch that one. "It'd help if you'd just be quiet, Marci." Unaffected by his dark mood, she laughed. "Lighten up, Osbourne. It's not my fault, or the donkey's that you have such an irresistible bod." -Osbourne and Marcie

I hardly ever went to the AA [alcoholics anonymous] meetings. I’ve just never felt comfortable in those places. It’s my worst zone. I’ll get up and sing my heart out in front of two hundred thousand people at a rock festival, but when I’ve got to talk about the way I feel to people I’ve never met before, I can’t do it. There’s nothing to hide behind.

If you want to be a fucking individual, don’t get a tattoo. Every fucker’s got one these days.

But that's what falling in love was, right? A socially acceptable form of insanity?

The revolution is not happening today.

Never trust a man with money or sex; no man ever thinks he gets enough of either.

You’d walk off the bus and instantly, the first thing you’d hear was ‘You saved my life!’ I’d never heard that said more than when I was with Gerard.

We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony [Iommi] launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you f**king serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’ ‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’ ‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dream-in’”.’ ‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony. ‘That’s what your manager told me!’ ‘Jim Simpson told you that?’ ‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’ ‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’ He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers.

Booker Sistrunk sat awkwardly with his hands behind him and continued the mouthing: “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself, treating a brother like this.” “The white guy’s gettin’ the same treatment,” Ozzie said. “You’re violating my civil rights.” “And you’re violatin’ mine with your mouth. Now shut up or I’ll lock you under the jail. We got a little basement down there.

But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.

He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a feather-weight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he practised what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road. A good man. I really miss him.

I’m not so comfortable with politicians. Meeting them always just feels weird and a bit creepy, no matter who it is. For example, I met Tony Blair during The Osbournes period at this thing called the Pride of Britain Awards. He was all right, I suppose; very charming. But I couldn’t get over the fact that our young soldiers were dying out in the Middle East and he could still find the time to hang around with pop stars. Then he came over to me and said, ‘I was in a rock’n’roll band once, y’know?’ I said, ‘So I believe, Prime Minister.’ ‘But I could never work out the chords to “Iron Man”.’ I wanted to say, ‘F**k me, Tony, that’s a staggering piece of information, that is. I mean, you’re at war with Afghanistan, people are getting blown up all over the place, so who honestly gives a f**k that you could never work out the chords to “Iron Man”?’ But they’re all the same, so there’s no point getting wound up about it.

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation. American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.

Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later. Not that it made any f**king difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care, because the BBC played it on Radio 1. Once. At six o’clock in the morning. I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it...’ But then: BLAM...BLAM... Dow-doww... BLAM... Dow-dow-d-d-dow, dooooow... D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d DUH-DA! Do-doo-do DUH-DA! Do-doo-do... It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the f**king radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up.

When we were recording the Ozzmosis album we did a batch of it in New York. There was this occult bookstore...and they had everything in there on Wicca, Catholicism, Satanism, the whole nine yards. I was getting some Aleister Crowley stuff because Jimmy Page owned the castle (Crowley's former home) and the other guys were into him. ...I go to get his poster they had in there, I go "How much for this poster?" and the guy looks at me deadpan and goes "$6.66." I put seven bucks down and say "Keep the goddamn change. I can't take it, dude." So I hang the poster up and the boss man (Ozzy) walks in and he goes "Zakk, who's the guy upon the wall?" . I'm crying laughing and he goes "Zakk, who the fuck is he?!" I said "Ozz, you don't know who that is?" He goes "I don't fucking know, who is it?!" I said "Ozz! It's Aleister Crowley, bro!" He goes "Oh is that what that bald-headed cunt looks like?

Sí, cabe reconocer, con respecto a las primeras obras de Dante, que en el tratamiento de la violencia prevalece una asepsia, una suavidad usual en tantas producciones Amblin: cuando los criminales asaltan los laboratorios haciéndose pasar por reparadores de teléfonos (sic), atacan con gas y no con pistolas; armas de fuego y explosiones escasean en la película. Sin embargo, esta gestión de la violencia responde, en paralelo, a la personalidad del director: Dante puede triturar a un soldado en Pequeños guerreros, explotar a un gremlin en un microondas, recrearse en el cadáver de Igoe corroído por el ácido en El chip prodigioso o en cómo niños son devorados por pirañas; en cambio, a la hora de exhibir armas de fuego objeta contra la proliferación de disparos, revólveres y ametralladoras. La banalización del efecto destructivo de la munición despoja de su significado a artilugios con una función homicida, que se convierten en meras imágenes sin sentido. Todo el metraje de Pequeños guerreros patentizará la postura del director, que en El chip prodigioso refrenda el pasmo del niño ataviado a lo Rambo ante el disparo (real) que hiere a Ozzie.

Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them." This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.

A question shot through his brain. “Can this be me?” For a thirteen-year-old who had just labeled his religious leader a bastard, twice, it was not an improper question. Louder and louder the question came to him–“Is it me? Is it me?”–until he discovered himself no longer kneeling, but racing crazily towards the edge of the roof, his eyes crying, his throat screaming, and his arms flying every whichway as though not his own. “Is it me? Is it me Me Me Me Me? It has to be me–but is it!” It is a question a thief must ask himself the night he jimmies open his first window, and it is said to be the question with which bridegrooms quiz themselves before the altar. In the few wild seconds it took Ozzie’s body to propel him to the edge of the roof, his self-examination began to grow fuzzy. Gazing down at the street, he became confused as to the problem beneath the question: was it, is-it-me-who-called-Binder-a-bastard? or, is-it-me-prancing-around-on-the roof? However, the scene below settle all, for there is an instant in any action when whether it is you or somebody else is academic. The thief crams in the money in his pockets and scoots out the window. The bridegroom signs the hotel register for two. And the boy on the roof finds a streetful of people gaping at him, necks stretched backwards, faces up, as though he was the ceiling of the Hayden Planetarium. Suddenly you know it’s you.

commonly crossed talons, and eagles squared off against falcons and loons, to say nothing of other eagles. This was no different from when wildlife populations had been at their apex before Euramericans swept over the continent. Conflicts and displays of territoriality were common, and sometimes these kinds of events manifested unexpected and even unconventional behavior that not even scientists could explain. The mystery revealed itself most strikingly when eagles at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in Illinois gave cam viewers a rousing performance in 2017 of an intereagle conflict different from Ozzie and M-15’s. Five years earlier, a couple named Valor and Hope had occupied a nest at the eighty-foot top of a silver maple. Valor was not the quintessential devoted parent. He was an unreliable provider. After eggs were laid that year, he rarely assumed his sitting duties. When chicks were in the nest and Hope called for him to bring food, he typically ignored her, forcing Hope to leave the chicks in Valor’s capricious care as she herself went off to hunt. At best, he would squat at the nest’s edge for a few minutes before taking flight to wherever whim took him. In the end, Hope could not sustain the brood without a fully present partner, and her two eaglets died. When Hope returned to the nest the next year, 2013, she brought another mate with her. Valor showed up only to find he’d been ousted. He didn’t fight off his rival, which seems consistent with his inertia as a parent. He didn’t leave the eagledom either, and the new mate didn’t chase him away. Hope and her new partner, whom the refuge’s nest stewards named Valor II, remained cordial toward the original Valor. A couple years later, Valor was part of nest life again, alongside Hope and Valor II. Having emerged from his parental torpor, he assumed the responsibilities of a proper partner. The birds formed a threesome. The refuge’s visitor service manager quipped that the upper Mississippi had its “own little soap opera.” In 2015, the couple and their new partner raised three eaglets.44 Parenting trios in the wild aren’t altogether uncommon, although