Ozzy 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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wind is renewable. Turbines are not.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

You can never take the violence back.

‘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.’

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.

‘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.

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.

'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

‘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.

Nothing more, nothing less...

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.

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

I hated school. Hated it.

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

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.

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.

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

I have the greatest respect for Tony Iommi.

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

Shock is a very weird thing.

Creativity thrives where its roots are crowded.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.’

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.

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?'

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.

‘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?