There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

The fact that I'm virtually deaf. Any woman who's going to date a rock musician has to be prepared to repeat herself every 10 seconds. My wife asks me where we should go for dinner and it sounds like the schoolteacher from Charlie Brown.

You can make yourself the greatest singer in the world or the best drummer in the world with the aid of technology.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

You look up to your heroes and you shouldn't be intimidated by them; you should be inspired by them.

I think that if you're passionate about something and you're driven and you're focused, then you can pretty much do anything that you want to do in life.