Tobias Forge

“If you're going to a show that we're providing support for, or a large festival, you're obviously going to see a condensed version. We have to shave off some fat from the show, so we have to stick to the so-called 'bangers.'”

“The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.”

“With Ghost, I never really foresaw that it was going to take off the way it did.”

“I'm a big fan of the first one, but one of the first horror films I ever saw on my own was 'Halloween II.' That was my first real experience of Halloween as a concept because in Sweden in the Eighties, we didn't celebrate Halloween.”

“I've been in lots of situations in my life where I've managed to turn pain into growing pains.”

“If you've followed us from when we started playing live in October 2010, you will notice that there has been numerous changes over the years.”

“So many people have opinions based not on fact but spite.”

“I'm a big fan of '80s music, for lack of a better word.”

“Artistically, or just performance-wise, I love playing arenas. I think that is my favorite form, because it's big enough to feel like a big, grand show.”

“I grew up watching a lot of film.”

“I wasn't letting people in with the music writing process, and for a long time, I thought I was hard to work with.”

“I don't want to do Ghost as a normal, unmasked band standing around in, like, denim jackets. That was never the plan, regardless of whether people knew who I was or what size shoe I wear.”

“By sheer luck, we did our first tour of America as a headlining act.”

“Once you get people's attention, you have a greater responsibility to tell them something of value.”

“The original idea of being anonymous - it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we'd be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn't foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.”

“Most bands that don't want to become big at all, they don't play. If you don't want to be known, if you don't want to make it, don't play. That's the easiest way not to do it.”

“I grew up in a very music-loving home with a lot of records, a lot of TV, a lot of radio, a lot of video - VHS cinema, basically.”

“I prefer catchy, passionate, temperamental music. And as an upside of that, Ghost's repertoire has, over the years, been piqued by a few, sort of, hits.”

“From my point of view, a lot of the things that we've done over our entire career have always been a big failure because it was never the way that I planned it. But then there's always upsides with it that turn out to be better or greater than the original plan.”

“We've gone from venues that hold 500 up to 3,000 on our own, so I guess we're not entirely unknown. But there is a difference between a few thousand people and 20,000.”