Top 50 Bruce Dickinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is too short to do the things you don’t love doing.”

— Bruce Dickinson

2. “Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.”

— Bruce Dickinson

3. “If heavy metal bands ruled the world, we’d be a lot better off.”

— Bruce Dickinson

4. “My dad always told me, ‘I don’t care what you do. Just aim to be the best at it. Even if it’s the world’s best window cleaner.’”

— Bruce Dickinson

5. “Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you’ll have an engineer for life.”

— Bruce Dickinson

6. “Bullying happens because weak people need to prop up their ego by beating up or humiliating others.”

— Bruce Dickinson

Featured in: Bullying Quotes

7. “Engineering stimulates the mind.”

— Bruce Dickinson

8. “We’re better than Metallica. We’re better musicians, better players. Put it this way, they can try to walk onstage after an Iron Maiden show if they want.”

— Bruce Dickinson

9. “Tyranny of freedom is do what you like. There’s a world gone crazy, cause it can’t say no.”

— Bruce Dickinson

10. “If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it’s going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.”

— Bruce Dickinson

11. “The mystical poetry of William Blake’s artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.”

— Bruce Dickinson

12. “Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative.”

— Bruce Dickinson

13. “Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.”

— Bruce Dickinson

14. “Nothing in childhood is ever wasted.”

— Bruce Dickinson

15. “I find that fencing and training give me more stamina and help me deal with the craziness of being on the road so much.”

— Bruce Dickinson

16. “Apart from death and taxes, the one thing that’s certain in this life is that I’ll never be a fashion icon.”

— Bruce Dickinson

17. “Don’t ask me to put up a shelf, but I love engineering.”

— Bruce Dickinson

18. “With the Internet, bands can come and go every five minutes and the music looks disposable.”

— Bruce Dickinson

19. “I guess it was the first time I really thought about leaving. I don’t just mean Iron Maiden, I mean quitting music altogether. I just thought, ‘Nothing is worth feeling like this for.’ I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig.”

— Bruce Dickinson

20. “I do like Marylin Manson, actually. I think, he’s very talented and he did make some great music.”

— Bruce Dickinson

21. “South Wales is a hub of aviation.”

— Bruce Dickinson

22. “Some of Eminem’s rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It’s kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.”

— Bruce Dickinson

23. “Best two rock voices I’ve heard in a last few years both have been from grunge bands: it’s Eddie Vedder and the other one is Chris Cornell from Soundgarden.”

— Bruce Dickinson

24. “If you dream something, it might happen. If you never dream it, it will never happen.”

— Bruce Dickinson

25. “I’ve been to the Reading festival twice before-as a punter, though I stayed backstage in the hospitality tent!”

— Bruce Dickinson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “Iron Maiden is an institution, and I’m delighted that I’m involved in it, but there was a time that I wasn’t delighted so I quit.”

— Bruce Dickinson

27. “Business is just about enabling human beings, nothing more, nothing less. Businesses need to recognize this fundamental fact.”

— Bruce Dickinson

28. “Anybody auditions for X-Factor it’s because they want to be famous, not because they are artists.”

— Bruce Dickinson

29. “I shall refract myself, yes, I shall no longer be known as the prism.”

— Bruce Dickinson

30. “I don’t have interns. I don’t have a manager. I don’t have assistants. I don’t have a secretary. I can’t figure out Outlook Express. I’m the worst person in the world answering e-mails, and my phone is probably the oldest, most battered phone you can find. So I just talk to people.”

— Bruce Dickinson

31. “I’m trying to be as green as I can. As an airline pilot, I have a carbon footprint that’s a size 10, so it’s pretty hard.”

— Bruce Dickinson

32. “Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn’t want to reach 40 and have to say all I’d done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.”

— Bruce Dickinson

33. “I never intended to become a professional pilot. But, as I became more curious about aircraft, and, well, not being John Travolta, I realized that the only way I was ever going to fly a jet is if I got a job.”

— Bruce Dickinson

34. “Teachers need to be more inspirational. But it’s also up to engineering to make itself more interesting.”

— Bruce Dickinson

35. “I think the best way to find out about something is to try to do it to the max. A lot of people take up a hobby or sport and then find an excuse not to carry on with it. Once I start something, I won’t stop until I’m as good at it as I’ll ever be.”

— Bruce Dickinson

36. “My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals they’re screaming-growling stuff and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, ‘Hats off to you.’”

— Bruce Dickinson

37. “When I was in employment as a regular line pilot, I used to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden. I got lucky – they let me off.”

— Bruce Dickinson

38. “I guess that the salary that they get when they are working with me is, like, it beats working at McDonalds, so it has got some things going for it.”

— Bruce Dickinson

39. “A few of these interviews have gone slightly awry, because every now and again there has been the odd conflict of interest between interviews because of the Iron Maiden record, and I am a bit long-winded.”

— Bruce Dickinson

40. “I had memorised Deep Purple’s Made in Japan note for note. Every drumbeat, every thud of Ian Paice’s bass-drum beater, I had tried to replicate. Ditto the first Black Sabbath album, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, plus my eccentric collection of Van der Graaf Generator albums and treasured copy of Wild Turkey’s first offering.”

— Bruce Dickinson

41. “One of my earliest ventures was when I was nine years old. I realized there was a shortage of pencils at school, so I started Rent-a-Pencil. But I made a fundamental mistake. Everybody stole my pencils.”

— Bruce Dickinson

42. “In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I’d convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.”

— Bruce Dickinson

43. “The more guitars we have onstage the better, as I’m concerned.”

— Bruce Dickinson

44. “I don’t like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!”

— Bruce Dickinson

45. “I was an accident – my mum was only 16 when she had me.”

— Bruce Dickinson

46. “Major labels blow all their money massively and blame it on the band.”

— Bruce Dickinson

47. “My aim as a frontman is always to try and shrink the venue, if you can, to turn that football stadium into the world’s smallest club. At least you have to try.”

— Bruce Dickinson

48. “I’m not going to do any more solo touring.”

— Bruce Dickinson

49. “The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan – what’s she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair.”

— Bruce Dickinson

50. “When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don’t do songs from outside people.”

— Bruce Dickinson