Quotes from Phil Anselmo

You're always going to have detractors, and you're always going to have people who love you, and that's how it's perfectly balanced and the world spins on.

I wake up, and I'll just start reading and trying to brace myself for the rest of the day, and all the while I'm doing that, I'm kicking myself mentally.

I love to play guitar. I've been writing my own songs on the axe since I was nine years old. I suck at leads.

I think anyone who suffers from chronic pain can agree with this - you feel this great significance. What I wanted to capture was that significance, and as a matter of fact I think that's one of the lyrics on 'Conflict,' on the split. I touch on the significance, and really it's a selfish thing, in an offbeat way.

I'm a bad pessimist. I don't think about how successful any record I've ever done is going to do before it came out.

I went from being a kid-kid, listen to everything from The Beatles through Kiss, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull classic rock, classic stuff into immediately, it seemed like, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. The first Iron Maiden record and then, obviously, the first Metallica record.

I tried to take heavy metal... and balled it up and chopped it in half and really tried to create a new form of energy. I really tried to re-shape extreme music as I see it through my eyes.

To me, I'm for a band whose forefront is the music.

I'm glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I've been in a cave of music for months and months and months.

I think Pantera is a type of band that has been documented very, very well over the years. With the past re-releases, we were fortunate enough to have old demos and stuff that never really saw the light of day. But Pantera was not the type of band to waste many riffs or many parts or songs.

At least in my life, I cannot hold onto grudges. It's a waste of energy, a waste of time.

It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... there's too much of it out there.

The success that Pantera had, I could have never, ever forecasted or predicted, and I always felt a responsibility to try to pay even a bit of it forward.

Everyone's gonna have their opinion, everyone's gonna have their favorite bands. The best way I can describe it is music is like food, either you love it, hate it, or are indifferent about it. Or you grow up and acquire a taste for it.

There has got to be a lot of unreleased video out there, live footage and whatnot. There's always going to be something extra for the Pantera fan.

I loathe rock stars. I am a music nerd, a fan, a follower... just like any fan of music might be. And although I have blood-relatives, a lot of times I feel closer to my audience than my true family, because at least my fans get what I'm doing, to a certain extent, whereas my family does not.

I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.

Pantera revolutionized the sound and the approach to heavy metal. It's been regurgitated. Once you up the production on a product and not just the playing but the actual production, then it's going to up the ante.

I wasn't that wild about that. I told them basically if they were really going to want to bring back heavy metal to a program on MTV, then they are really going to have to get in touch with what real heavy metal is.

There's always something going on, but thank goodness these days it's with a clear head, which helps me massively.

The lead guitar work is a bit repetitious, but when a song is under two minutes long, I don't have much room anyway. Thank goodness. But I've always contributed guitar parts to every band I've ever been in, so I'll always play the axe.

We definitely have a hardcore following.

With this LP we were all very clear on the approach we wanted to take, which was to do something heavy, but also experiment with a lot of other things we really like.

There it is again. Image. Once again. I get really tired of it quick.