Bruce Dickinson

“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.”

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

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

“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.'”

“I'm very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.”

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

“I've had a bit of experience at lots and lots of different arenas as it were, some of them completely creative, some of them quite technical. The interesting thing is, is that I found that the technical arenas actually are also very creative or can be very creative.”

“Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things.”

“There are a lot of stuff on the record that I am thinking is generic but actually it is just as good as everybody else who is putting stuff out at the time.”

“I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.”

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

“A guy called Arthur Brown... was a big influence of mine... and also Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull.”

“Well, it's a nice quiet time for Iron Maiden, and I'll be releasing a new solo album next year, so this is a really good time for the managing out my solo career, which is quite well.”

“If your only arbiter of anything is money, really you should... go and rob banks.”

“Engineering stimulates the mind.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The joke in aviation is, 'If you want to make a million, you'd better start with £10m.'”

“When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.”