Bruce Dickinson Quotes

Fly, on your way, like an eagle / Fly as high as the Sun.

In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.

Teachers need to be more inspirational. But it's also up to engineering to make itself more interesting.

Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.

My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.”

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.

Tyranny of freedom is do what you like. There's a world gone crazy, cause it can't say no.

I've been to the Reading festival twice before-as a punter, though I stayed backstage in the hospitality tent!

In the days when Glastonbury was an alternative festival, it was quite interesting. Now it is the most bourgeois thing on the planet ... we'll leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury and the rest of the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth and drink a lot of beer and have fun.

Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

I guess it was the first time I really thought about leaving. I don't just mean Iron Maiden, I mean quitting music altogether. I just thought, 'Nothing is worth feeling like this for.' I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig.

In my naïvety, I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea.

Anybody auditions for X-Factor it's because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.

King in Crimson is actually an alchemical term. King Crimson is a metaphor for Devil or Satan, but at the same time it's also a metaphor for one of the statures in the purification of man and the purification of mankind soul towards union with God and with Infinite, which is the philosophical aim of alchemists.

If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.

I think the best way to find out about something is to try to do it to the max. A lot of people take up a hobby or sport and then find an excuse not to carry on with it. Once I start something, I won't stop until I'm as good at it as I'll ever be.

There are basically two categories of music: Metal and bullshit.

Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you'll have an engineer for life.

Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change

I guess that the salary that they get when they are working with me is, like, it beats working at McDonalds, so it has got some things going for it.

When I was in employment as a regular line pilot, I used to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden. I got lucky - they let me off

You can sail in the desert with a ship of fools. You can smuggle in Moses and his book of rules. But you can't take a mother and give her back her son. What kind of freedom is bought with a gun? People like to build their prison walls when they're afraid to look inside... a thousand points of light are the muzzle flashes in the night. And the freedoms you profess to hold won't bring the dead back from the cold.

I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.

The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan - what's she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair.

Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative.

I don't have interns. I don't have a manager. I don't have assistants. I don't have a secretary. I can't figure out Outlook Express. I'm the worst person in the world answering e-mails, and my phone is probably the oldest, most battered phone you can find. So I just talk to people.

We're better than Metallica. We're better musicians, better players. Put it this way, they can try to walk onstage after an Iron Maiden show if they want.