Quotes from Ville Valo

I think love keeps on changing every day. It's not black and white and it's definitely more than 50 shades of grey.

Love is the funeral of hearts.

I've always been a huge reggae fan.

Music for me is an emotional thing and it really does make me happy. It's not a tool for me to get fame or see my face in the papers or anything like that. It's about the fact that I really do enjoy it.

It's like that with what sort of ideas people outside of the band have of HIM. They all see it through a different lens as well which is beautiful. Hopefully, it makes it an endless topic of conversation.

In almost every interview someone asks what does HIM stand for. I can't even remember our latest lie about that. When Hanson was hot, we said it means Hanson Is Murder. The name doesn't have a particular history. His Infernal Majesty was a totally different band. I think HIM derives from some death metal joke.

Love is madness, you can't put it in doses, it either surges over or under

I love Johnny Cash but I don't love country music that much.

I love the Ronettes, the 'do-run-run-run' pop stuff. I love the lyrics, having 'blue, blue blue' being repetitive.

I like to listen to mellow stuff on the road like Travis, as we are constantly surrounded by rock music on tour and so its nice listening to mellow stuff. Obviously back at home I listen to a lot more rock music.

I'm a huge fan of James Dean, that got me started. Nowadays I smoke four packs in a day.

We're trying to have the band create something beautiful that hopefully one day, 20 years from now, can be picked up by a kid and hopefully have the same effect that Neil Young had on me, or Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath.

I didn't have any role models really. My best friend was a dog. My mum and dad saved a dog from the gutter and that dog was my brother before Jesse was born. Sami was his name and he was my role model.

Women are always beautiful.

Women aren't objects that you look at only on weekends.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

Women are interesting, but that isn't the problem, it is that I like being alone, and I'm also touring so much that it's hard to get a relationship to work.

I haven't been baptised. My dad's not in the church and is not a religious person. My mum is more spiritual - she does Thai-chi and goes to Stonehenge and things like that. I'm proud to be pagan. Finland is not really a religious country. I'm still looking for my god.

The guys in Kiss use some make up too so at first it was exiting. I've almost stopped using make-up nowadays.

I hate it when bands do that; they're so proud of their new album, they have to play all of it and a couple of golden oldies.

Hopefully it will be possible to get all our other albums in American shops one day so if people are interested they can hear it but I'm hoping that people are going to be interested in what we are going to do, not just what we've done.

Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there's nothing wrong with it.

Play as well as you can; that's it, as opposed to creating these odd paranoias, trying to be something you're not.

Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.