Quotes from Ozzy Osbourne

Mind you, no one who lives in the real world spends the whole time going around saying, 'Oh yes,darling, I understand, let's talk about our "feelings", lah-dee-f**king-dah.' People who say they've never had a cross word are living on another f**king planet.

At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban 'Suicide Solution' and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they'd have to ban Shakespeare, 'cos Romeo and Juliet's about suicide, too.

I wasn't exactly much fun to be around. Being with me was like falling into an abyss.

Nothing more, nothing less...

If you're determined to commit suicide, you'll blow your brains out or you'll jump off a tall building. You'll do something that you can't take back, in other words. When you 'try to kill yourself' by taking too many pills – like I did – you know you're probably gonna get found by someone. So all you're doing is sending a message.

I always thought that whatever I had was temporary.

I don't think we [ Black Sabbath ] ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews.

I couldn't believe it when I learned that people actually 'practised the occult'. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I'd say to them, 'Look, mate, the only evil spirits I'm interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.'

But one of the many problems with being an alcoholic is that when people tell you how bad you are when you're drunk, you're usually drunk. So you just keep getting drunk.

I didn't have a clue what love was about until I met Sharon.

Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?' he asked me. 'Yeah,' I told him. 'It's true.' 'Shit, man,' he said. 'We piss on it every night on our way home.'

I hated school. Hated it.

Even now, I have a lot of trouble understanding why Sharon stayed – or why she married me in the first place, come to think of it. I mean, she was actually afraid of me half the time. And the truth was I was afraid of me, too. Afraid of what I'd do to myself or, even worse, to someone else.

You don't have to believe in God to do the programme. You just have to accept that there's a higher power – it could be the lamp in the corner of the room, for all they care. Some people use nature, the ocean, their d**k – whatever comes to mind.

I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn't have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, 'Sorry, we want subjects, not objects'.

I have the greatest respect for Tony Iommi.

Apart from Tony Iommi – who I'd never seen again since leaving school – I didn't even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I'd look the part. The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a f**king bastard.

It was the first time I'd ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, 'Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.'

You never really know what's going on inside Tony Iommi's head. He's the total opposite of me, in other words: no one's ever in any doubt about what's going on in the pile of old jelly inside my thick skull.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song 'Black Sabbath' . But I've always had a bee up my arse about the term 'heavy metal'. To me, it doesn't say anything musically, especially now that you've got seventies heavy metal , eighties heavy metal , nineties heavy metal and new - millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they're all the same.

As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.

Shock is a very weird thing.

I'd always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.

Y'know, swearing is just part of who we are – we're forever effing and blinding.