“I’d been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour.”

“Taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just f**king ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.”

“I’d always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.”

“I remember saying to Tony [Iommi], ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’”

“‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’”

“It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, 'Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.'”

“I was twenty now, and had given up all hope of being a singer or ever getting out of Aston. PA system or no PA system, it wasn’t going to happen. I’d convinced myself that there was no point in even trying, because I was just going to fail, like I had at school, at work, and at everything else I’d ever tried. ‘You ain’t no good as a singer,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t even play an instrument, so what hope d’you have?’”