Steven Tyler Quotes

Rose: Look at you, beaming away like you're Father Christmas! The Doctor: Who says I'm not, red-bicycle-when-you-were-twelve? Rose: [shocked] What? The Doctor: And everybody lives, Rose! Everybody lives! I need more days like this! Go on, ask me anything; I'm on fire!

Some days you're the bug, some days you're the windshield.

If you have a candle, the light won't glow any dimmer if I light yours off of mine.

Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us.

You'd be surprised how expensive it costs to look this cheap.

We believed anything worth doing was worth over-doing

Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

Half my life is in book's written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.

Songwriting is a bitch. And then it has puppies

The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those that got there first.

Did you eat a lot of paint chips as a child?

Well hellfire save matches, fuck a duck and see what hatches!

You should have felt the buzz the moment all five of us got together in the same room for the first time again. We all started laughin'—it was like the five years had never passed. We knew we'd made the right move.

My Get Up and Go Has Not Got Up and Went!

To love and be loved is all we know and all we need to know.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

They've been stepping on my toes for years. It's just a reason to get new boots.

I was born when the Dead Sea was still sick.

Love may be the best driving wheel, but anger is a pretty good second.

Sure, we're the sum of our experiences. If you listen to that song I wrote in 1969, "Dream On," you might get a different view. I may not have been quite sure of what I was doing, but I was on to something.

So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues.

You've got to lose to know how to win.

These are war stories. When you’re on tour, short of loss of life and limb – or actual death – you have no time to get sick like a normal person. There are no days off. You’re working yourself to death. The only thing that got us through was the cocaine.

I may be a monster, but I’m a sensitive monster… I went to church, I have a sister, I’m Italian, and I’ve probably seen the sun set and rise as many times as anyone. I liked cutting the umbilical cord at my son Taj’s birth. I liked smelling the placenta. I like the act of making love rather than saying, “I fucked you!” If anybody wants to see the spiritual side of Steven Tyler, well, it’s fucking there!

Gay sex just doesn't do it for me. I tried it one time when I was younger, but just didn't dig it.

The past is gone. It went by like dusk to dawn.

Sometimes I feel compelled to read parts of these memoirs so I can remember things about me that I don’t remember.

Tyler. “We should cover that tune. Whose original is this?” “What the fuck are you talking about, Steven?” I said. “That’s us.” “Is it?” he asked. “Hell yes, it is.” “Where was I?” “In the booth, singing.

Sex is the strongest force in the universe. Forget about the Grand Unifying Theory, Stephen Hawking, I’ll tell you what it is: women. Aren’t women the strongest sex? What force is more magnetic than that? It’s not just pussy. We’re attracted to women for their energy. We’re attracted to their fluidness, their ability to nurture a baby without even knowing how, to be able to put up with screaming and crying and colic and shitty diapers where men would go, “I’m fucking outta here! I’m gonna go kill me a saber-toothed woolly mammoth an’bring it on home to eat tonight. Wa-haaaaaa!” We don’t have tits; we couldn’t nourish a gnat.

Everybody's got their dues in life to pay

Not long after that I was walking along the beach, I dropped to my knees, I began crying because I realized that I'd gotten sober, but I hadn’t done it for my kids, or even my own health. I hadn’t thought about them when I was using, so why would I have gotten sober for them, either. Drugs robbed me of my spirituality and compassion, only later to find I’d lost Liv and Mia as well — I cried when they forgave me for my past behaviors but I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life. What would I say to my children? We may have picked the key but they are their own song. We don’t own them, they only pass through us, as Kahlil Gibran says in The Prophet, they don’t owe us anything either.

By the end of the seventies, some nights I was so out of it our road manager, Joe Baptista, would have to carry me onstage. The promoter would be sitting there in the dressing room with a look of horror on his face. I’m almost comatose, he’s hyper-ventilating. He thinks he’s presenting the legendary cash cow Aerosmith, and now he’s going to lose his shirt because the lead singer’s down for the count. Is he dead or alive? What am I going to do? “You’d better get him on that stage. I don’t know how he’s going to do this how, but we’ve got too many kids out there.” Not to worry. The minute my feet hit the stage, I’m off and running. I don’t know how it happens, but hey, you get up there in front of twenty thousand people and it’s a high in itself, it’s a charged space. Still, the train kept a rollin’ and we kept getting high until one night in late ’78, I don’t know where we were, maybe in Springfield, Illinois, I blacked out in the middle of “Reefer Headed Woman.” I got a reefer headed woman She fell right down from the sky Well, I gots to drink me two fifths of whiskey Just to get half as high When the — And then I hit the stage like a fish out of water.

@LucyFitz Topic of the day: Celebs who look like other celebs. @BroderickAdams to @LucyFitz Julia Roberts = Steven Tyler. @LucyFitz to @BroderickAdams#mindblown

How do you avoid ’em? Screw ’em through Saran Wrap? Nah, if they washed, they were clean. As someone once said, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ till you’re down on a muffin”—and I’m no different.

Hearing Robert Plant and Steven Tyler wail and howl took him back to his own apprehensive first steps—when money was tight, hopes were unfulfilled only because they were untested—and everything still felt like it was possible. Fast forward twenty-five years, and now maybe the world looked more like a sadder version of the movie Rear Window. Where in each apartment you would see a lonely man quietly singing away his troubles in harmony with the rock 'n' roll gods whose voices transcended space and time.

Then we went into “Nobody’s Fault.” This was one of the highlights of my creative career. If you listen really close to the front of “Nobody’s Fault,” there isn’t an intro to the song. I suggested to Joe that he turn his amp volume to 12 and the volume on his guitar off. Since the key of the song was an E, I suggested he start by fingering a D chord, and then turn the volume knob all the way up slowly. I told Brad to play an A chord, same dealio as Joe. Then Joe played a C, did the same thing—Brad played a G, Joe played a B-flat, Brad played an F, Joe played an A-flat, Brad played an E-flat, and then Joe and Brad both played a D chord. And when they played that D together, rolling the volume knob up with their pinkies—and holding it for a second—then the band came in on a crashing E chord like Hitler was at the door. I looked over and Jack Douglas was internally hemorrhaging with bliss. I was in the middle of the room with my headphones on (which we called “cans”) and a live mic in front of me, because I loved singing live vocals as the band tracked. It always seemed to incite a little riot inside of everyone. Right before the band came in on the downbeat, the union engineer from Columbia marked his presence for all time by opening the door right in the middle of that sweet silence. He had a clarinet in his hand that wound up on the front of “Pandora’s Box,” but that’s another story. You can actually hear the door opening in “Nobody’s Fault” to this day and it somehow seems to get louder and louder with each play, only ’cause you know it’s there now.

I’d been a rock star ever since I could remember. I came out of my mother’s womb screaming for more than nipple and nurture. I was born to strut and fret my hour upon the stage, fill stadiums, do massive amounts of drugs, sleep with three nubile groupies at a time . . . AND endorse my own brand of barbecue sauce (oh no, that’s Joe).

Could you mix up the lollipop selection? We're almost out of birds and jungle animals, and we have way too many of these weird walrus things." Mabel didn't look up from the ball of sugar she was molding. "That's you, dipshit. Just balder this time. I took the liberty of giving Lollipop Jay a haircut since the breathing version seems to have lost the address of his barber." Helpfully, she added, "Imagine the walrus with a Steven Tyler wig, and look again.

You don't look a day over fabulous!

some place. That afternoon I was robbing the bank. Up at Alpine. It wasn't just me; there were three of us. Me, Michael Tyler, Steven Childress. 

By day’s end, there were seven hundred ODs on angel dust, one rape, and two dozen robberies. Two babies were born the night we played,

You know, looking back on that, I can’t believe I left because of her flashing . . . when here I am, humping Joe’s monitor during “Back in the Saddle” every night.

Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . . be here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.

I just figured out why guys like me turn into curmudgeons . . . the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, everybody has rolled over and given up, and there’s no more afternoon baseball.

If a drum beat is a hundredth of a second off, I become unstable. I rant, I rave, it has to be fixed or the world will stop spinning on its axis. I drive my band crazy with this shit.

Antagonism, pure nitro-charged agro, fuels inspiration.

Now the blues is, was, and always has been the bitch’s brew of the tormented soul. The fifth gospel of grits and groan, it starts with the first moan when Adam and Eve did the nasty thing and got eighty-sixed from the Garden of Eden.

But because I had decided not to be the drummer in the band, I gained a right IN MY MIND to be able to live vicariously through Joey.

The Beatles sang in a room that had a voice . . . which means the room had an echo. They didn’t have some ass fuck engineer try to get rid of it. They put it on the track like that. Once it’s a hit, that echo is on there forever.

When we were making Just Push Play, we recorded our empty room. If you record that hall noise and sing over it, it’s like letting the hall embrace you. It has chairs and equipment and people. The room IS another instrument. The room is in the band.

These things I knew and learned and passed on to Joey. So he played, and for the last thirty-five years, I lived through him. I don’t know how not to.

Life is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that makes you smile.

If you manifest the light, you will become a dartboard for others’ fears, doubts, and insecurities

I was brought up that way, a wild child of the woods and ponds. But of course, nobody believes that about me. They don’t know what to think when I say, “You know, I’m just a country boy.

If you go into a recording studio that’s soundproofed, something just feels wrong to your ears. Especially when they close the door—that’s sound deprivation, it’s anechoic, without echo, without sound.

I lost all that mystery when I was on drugs. Coming out of that din I was able to feel my spiritual connection to the woods again. Drugs will steal you like a crook. Spirituality, over. I could no longer see the things I used to see in my peripheral vision. No periphery, no visions.

My spiritual ideas didn’t come from the Lord’s Prayer or church or pictures in the Bible, they came from the stillness.

At the age of six, I learned all the hymns (and a few hers). I fell in love with two girls on either side of me in the choir.

I’d make my own cigarettes using corn silk. I’d put it on the stone wall, dry it out, roll it up in cigarette paper, and smoke it.

I never had to hide my pot smoking from my mom. I’d say, “Mom, you’re drinking! Why don’t you smoke pot instead?” I’d twist one up and say, “Ma, see what it smells like?” She never said, “Put that out!” mainly because Mom loved her five o’clock cocktail

I shoulda gone to see the gypsy, because before too long I found myself in a world of trouble and pain. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Gimme an E! Heavy is the head that wears the motherfucking Mad Hatter’s hat. Thank you, God, may I have another?

People, too, often miss the silver lining because they were expecting gold.