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"We use to drink just a little bit too much and never took ourselves seriously. I then learned how special life truly is. If the band didn't have the success it has today, you would have probably found me dead somewhere."

"I'm trying to picture some little girl whose favorite bands are like Goo Goo Dolls and Savage Garden or 'N Sync going 'Aww, that Johnny is so cute. I am going to buy all his early records,' and putting it on and then screaming and running to her parents."

[touring with No Doubt was like] "Having a dentist enter through your ass to pull your wisdom teeth out."

"My songs are in millions and millions of households, whether they're the songs on the radio or not. To me, that's a brilliant victory."

"I support anything that causes mass hysteria in children."
on pokemon

"I'm not looking for a dance hit, that's for sure. It's not like we need to call in Tricky to figure out why kids don't like us anymore."
on Gutterflower

"The records are just pretty much documents of our lives from the time we put out a record last, documents of things that have happened to us and things that we have seen on the way."

"Generally when I write something it's in response to something that makes my face red, whether it be jealously, or anger, happiness, or laughter."

"If people say, 'I can connect with this,' or 'This makes me feel a certain way,' then that is the most important thing and coolest because you've affected someone's life."

"What motivates me to do this? The fact that I do it and I don't want to stop. I look out and I feel I bring a little joy to people. To watch a room full of people with a smile going, 'Yeah I'm having a great time,' that's a pretty big payoff."

"I can safely say the [band members] are not fans of the current situation. It’s kind of a self-serving – in modern times,the most self-serving – presidency that has ever existed. It’s unreal."
on dubya's reign

"They just gave themselves free reign to do anything they want. These guys are some evil motherfuckers."
on the present situation in the government

"On other albums we always had this chaos going on, relationships in complete and utter chaos. Now we went to write this album and John's been married for a couple of years. I've had a girlfriend for four years. We had nothing to write about, no messed-up relationships to write about."
on writing A Boy Named Goo

"I've got one for you, from Alternative Press: 'Poison fronted by Tommy Stinson.' All I could say was, 'What the hell?!' We also get a lot of the 'meets' stuff, like 'Metallica meets R.E.M.'"
on comparisons to other bands

"It’s great. We get all these secretaries out to our show expecting a bunch of soft ballads, and we send them home with their ears bleeding."

"I mean, we get to be choppered onto an aircraft carrier, and they can't even tell us where it is. That's really cool. We asked, 'Where's it gonna be?' And the Navy was like, 'Well, we don't know. It'll be in the Mediterranean, how's that?'"
on Christmas shows for US troops overseas

"It's all about the quality of what you do, not necessarily the acceptance by the mainstream. Then, I think you are going to make a very honest record for yourself."

"[more recently acquired fans] look at us like, 'Is there something wrong with their equipment?' It cracks me up."
reactions to older material at concerts

"I'm sure there are people in their Doc Martins and Ramones T-shirts stomping around The Continental in Buffalo mad at the world because of it. But if you are going to be in a band for 16 years, you have to be true to yourself."
on accusations of "selling out" (which the Goos haven't done!)

"If you are going to pretend you are Marky or Dee Dee (Ramone) until you're 50, it's not going to work. You have to move on."

"People here just love to rally around things. I think it's cool we can do well for them."
on Goo Goo Dolls Day in Buffalo

"There's not all that much going on in Buffalo. You can tell when you watch the news on TV, and the big news is a grease fire at Edith Kendall's house."

"It was two straight months watching people swallow beer and snort cocaine. We watched how stress affected a band to the point where they couldn't hack the pace, and ended up barely functioning. We've spent enough time being part of the underground scene to know that if you learn your lessons well, you'll survive."
on a tour with gang green in summer 1987

"It seems like we are one of the few live performers left that actually play live. Most other people are using prerecorded songs to play at concerts."

"Sleeping on other people's dirty mattresses in their parents' basement is something that has changed with success."

"I always see shocked faces the first time I walk up to the microphone during a show. I'll sing the first line of one of my songs, and every heard turns from John's microphone right toward mine. If you listen to the songs it seems so obvious, but I guess a lot of folks just never thought about it."

"There's a certain perception the public has of this band, and that's John standing out in front, doing what he does so unbelievable well. It's different from what I do. So am I disappointed that his songs are always the singles? Absolutely not. Do I wish one of my songs would be a single? Well, if I had one I could probably move into a house a little further up the hill, but no, I don't really care."

"We'll just do what we need to: shake hands, kiss babies for a little while, just give it our best shot."

"God bless VH1. It's the weirdest thing, but we're always on."

"I don't feel like a musician - I feel like a kid with a guitar."

"I'd rather sit for 17 hours trying to figure out how to do something than pay someone to show me in 25 minutes."

"Most good things in my life have come from having that bass in my hands, so I consider myself a bass player - but not a musician. I don't mean that as a stab to bass players; many are musicians. I feel the same way about producing and running a recording console. As long as I stick to what I know and keep learning along the way, then I'm progressing at my own rate. And that's a good place to be."

"You know what happens? You get all that technology working and then you go out on tour and inevitably four nights outta five some guy forgets to hit some button, and then you're fucked."

"At first we thought we were being attacked by some tribe of, like, muddy people.... The mud kids! But they were just out there having fun. Their whole school was there: fifteen kids. I think more kids got thrown out of my school in a year."
from MTV's Music in High Places

"I don't think I've weeped so much since, like, Born Free. It's bad, man."
on seeing "City of Angels"

"I think one of the psychological low points was when we'd just put out 'A Boy Named Goo', and we thought, 'Okay, we're gonna go out there and show the world'. So we went down to Georgia, pulled into this club and they'd forgotten we were playing. There were eight paying customers - and one guy wanted his money back because we didn't play long enough. I just remember lying in the bus, crushed."

"As you get a little older, you start to think. 'Do I really want to be 33 and still struggling? Am I struggling to make this something that it was never supposed to be?'. And luckily for us, every time that attitude crept in, something would happen which made it all seem worthwhile."

"I'd rather play a single note and make it COUNT whereas others will play ten and you can't even discern one! We are making the intensity of metal more accessible with our almost pop melodies, and this type of crossover, as George said, will become huge." (how prophetic!)
from a 1989 interview

"If we were going to be on the Happy Together Punk tour, then I hope that at the first show, there'll be a red dot on my forehead followed by a huge hole behind it. Just shoot me!"

"Have we read weird things? Yes. But you know what? They don't come anywhere NEAR to being as weird as the real things in everyday."
in answer to "what's the most bizarre thing you've read about yourself in the press that was so not true?"

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