Quotes from John Rzeznik

If Life hands you a lemon, throw it at someone

You grew up way too fast and now there's nothing to believe; and re-runs all become our history.

In my family, my earliest memory of you get out of line is - BAM! It was a lot of corporal punishment. But you can't do that.

I have this dreadful image of me driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, with the windows rolled down, and our song comes on... and I'm sitting there listening to it and some guy pulls up next to me and thinks, 'Hey, it's that guy from the Goo Goo Dolls... he's listening to his own music. What a jerk!'

The only way you fail is if you quit. That has always sort of been pounded into my head.

The business of making music is changing so radically because of the Internet. It's become a lot more democratic in one respect, but in another respect there's no one left to guide and mentor young bands.

We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?

I thought 'Gutterflower' was a really good record, but the album before that got so big that everyone expected us to go through that again.

I need a long, cold winter.

Performing with a hologram in a three-dimensional world feels somewhat strange. But you know, the experience of playing live in a room full of people is most exciting, it's something that the social media has not been able to recreate. There's some kind of intensity about it, something that the social media doesn't capture.

John Shanks is probably the biggest workaholic I've ever met in my life.

I never underestimate luck and working hard.

I enjoy watching Chris Matthews a lot. He reminds me of a throwback to the older school kind of pundits like Tim Russert.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

I refuse to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I listen to a lot of conservative radio when I drive around in my car. I refuse to listen to him because he's just ridiculous, just a clown. I love Rachel Maddow obviously.

Having a collection of regrets when you hit your 40s is part of the deal.

A little renovation and reinvention is a positive thing.

I feel a whole lot of gratitude for having hits.

I no longer feel the pressure of trying to write hits for the radio anymore.

I just feel really lucky to have had some hits because we had a lot of time where we didn't have them. It's better to have a hit. You can ask anyone - U2, Green Day - and they'll tell you the same thing.

I just want my daughter to be respectful and nice to people. I want her to understand the importance of being humble.

I have a very powerful form of alcoholism. I finally gave up and accepted the fact that if I even smell too much booze, I'm going to start drinking again. That's just how I am.

One of the things about live music that's so incredibly important and can't be replaced and automated is the common focus of a room full of people having that human contact and being immersed in the sensory overload of a rock concert.

We were so heavily influenced by The Replacements and by a lot of hard core bands like Bad Brains, not that we sounded like them but we were trying to play as hard and fast as we could.