Quotes from Tobias Forge

For us, if you're a rock band, there's no way around it. You have to tour. You have to tour a whole lot.

I always layer my vocals a lot. I sing a minimum of three layers of the same line every time, and then it's always one or two or sometimes even more harmonies.

The music comes first. Final lyrics are usually written very close to recording the vocals.

Technically, a Ghost song could just be piano and vocals, but it could also be full, pounding, heavy-thrashing hard rock.

By sheer luck, we did our first tour of America as a headlining act.

I'm a big fan of '80s music, for lack of a better word.

Let's just say that I've spent a lot of time being not very successful.

I've always been very - for lack of a better phrase - hit-seeking, hit-driven.

I love pinball.

I never, ever, wanna see 'The Conjuring' again - ever. I don't wanna see 'Annabelle' again.

You want to be as successful as possible. You wanna have the strongest legs to stand on as possible for every album that you're doing.

I would like to say, and I think I am truthful, and I think I am honest when I say that I love doing Ghost. And if I didn't feel as passionate as I am and have been, about it, wanting to focus, basically, all my time on it, I don't wanna do it.

If you'd asked me when I was six, 16, and 26, I wanted nothing more than to be a big, recognized rock star. Especially when I was six and 16, because I thought that if I was a known guitar player in a known band, only cute girls would talk to me.

Even though I like speaking freely, I don't really have a desire anymore to profile myself as the individual wanting to be recognized.

The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.

I've had a very, very forgiving and a very, very supportive mother who never really gave me a hard time for going in and out of slackerdom.

From my point of view, a lot of the things that we've done over our entire career have always been a big failure because it was never the way that I planned it. But then there's always upsides with it that turn out to be better or greater than the original plan.

You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like 'Ritual,' a song like 'Absolution' or 'Idolatrine.' You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.

Even though 'Prequelle' is a record about death, essentially, it's a record about survival, and I think that that is something that's gone through all the records. Even back to 'Opus Eponymous,' there was a double meaning to things that doesn't necessarily have to do with evil sermons out of some old grimoire somewhere how to summon the devil.

I'm a big fan of the first one, but one of the first horror films I ever saw on my own was 'Halloween II.' That was my first real experience of Halloween as a concept because in Sweden in the Eighties, we didn't celebrate Halloween.

My ability maps my own writing. I haven't spent a whole lot of time biting licks from the really quick masters. That's why I'm not very good at that sort of super-fast, shreddy sweeping. So I've never considered myself a traditionally good, fast-playing guitarist.

In grade one and two, I was definitely into heavy metal and Satanic rock music, bands that had attributes that were quote-unquote 'Satanic,' even things like the Rolling Stones with 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' and 'Sympathy for the Devil,' but also like Motley Crue and Kiss and Alice Cooper.

I think that it's crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist - that's what artists do.

It is difficult to be that band that doesn't do things the way other bands do it. It's a blessing and a curse.