There is one statement I want you to keep after you are finished with this book. It is more of a mantra, really. Nonetheless, let it crawl across your mind any time you feel you have been backed into a corner spiritually. It is very simple: Live your life, no matter what life is. Take that with you. Live your life. No matter what that life is.

Playing live is a lost art, and you don't see a lot of bands that go out and play the way the older bands do. It's a celebration, and a lot of people treat it like a commercial or a distraction.

If you want to be taken seriously, always check your fly.

You need response from the fan to fuel your sense of musical rebellion. It's very symbiotic, it's very cyclic in a way. You can't have one without the other. So I think the rebellion is reflected in the audience, but at the same time, the artist has to have that passion too. And I think once you're a fan for life, you feed each other's sense of passion and rage and whatnot. You really can't have one without the other.

I don't mean to be overly sensitive or anything like that, but you just have to take a minute in every day, and just reflect on where you are, and just realise what you've got, because you just never know where the next huge change in your life is going to come from.

Reality, for all intents and purposes, is just life - the real world, pure and uncut, shot straight to the vein of our souls every day we draw breath. Whether it's good or bad, it's still reality; the opposite of illusion, the foe of fantasy, and the anchor that keeps us stuck on this plane. And thank Buddha it does, because some people need it in huge doses.

Slipknot is the darkness; Stone Sour is the light. Slipknot is chaos; Stone Sour is structure.