“‘Dad,’ said Jack one day. ‘When you’re on the telly, d’you think people are laughing with you or at you?’The question had obviously been bothering him for a while.‘Y’know what,’ I said to him, ‘as long as they’re laughing, I don’t care.’‘But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?’‘Because I’ve always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these years.’And it’s true, y’know.”

“It’s just human nature – isn’t it? – to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?”

“It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people.”

“One day Sharon got a call from Greta Van Susteren, one of the anchors at Fox News.‘I was wondering if you and Ozzy wanted to have dinner next week with the President of the United States,’ she said.‘Is he in trouble again?’ asked Sharon.Greta laughed. ‘Not that I know of, no.’‘Thank God for that.’‘Will you come?’‘Of course we will. It would be an honour.’When Sharon told me, I couldn’t believe it. I always thought I’d be on a ‘Wanted’ poster on the Oval Office wall, not invited over for tea.”

“I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said bon voyage. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.'”

“I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his [Bill Ward] house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you d**k.’”

“It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order. I asked him why he did it once.‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’”