Flea Quotes

With acting, I always feel conscious of what I'm doing.

Everything that is not love is cowardice.

The universe gives us the ones we need. And the ones we deserve.

Before every show, we get into a circle, hold hands, and someone makes a speech. Most bands are too cool for that.

Turning 50 is a little bit of a 'taking stock' moment. I feel probably a little dumber. I don't think I'm as sharp as I was when I was younger, but I'm definitely wiser and less likely to make gigantic blunders of an intellectual, spiritual, emotional or physical type.

When I first heard about Twittering, I thought it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever heard of in my life. It's like the devil: the idea that your personal life is there for everybody.

I just lucked into this weird, little obscure cameoesque film career. I just love being a part of film history.

I went to school and studied music for a year at USC, which unlocked a bunch of doors for me in terms of my relationship to music.

Running opened up something beautiful in my life. I try to send the energy all over my body. I love the feeling of it.

You teach your kids about your beliefs and tell them what you think is right and the conclusions that you've come to from living in the world, and then they can make their own decisions.

We were at the dark end of the L.A. punk scene, and that scene was full-on and violent and aggressive and wild and intense.

I worked full time jobs, basically doing manual labor until I could make enough money supporting myself as a musician.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

Nothing special about me, we've all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgement, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself. And that's how I became the bass player I'm still trying to be. Just exploring for a sense of purpose.

I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to do music for a living, and that's what I dedicated my life to.

Kids deserve arts, and it's just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics.

Bands develop their own weird ways of doing things.

My whole musical life has been an educational process, and I'm just furthering my education and filling in the blanks. There's stuff that I want to know that I don't know.

The most important thing to me with any politician is that they don't start wars, but education is a big part of that, too, because educated people are less likely to do stupid, violent things.

We were these arty punks from Hollywood. I considered myself an intellectual.

Listen to me. Now is the time to be healthy. Treat your body and soul well. You can't see the damage you do to yourself now, but when you get old you will suffer. Give yourself a chance to be in perfect health. Be an honest and kind person. It is the only thing.

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

I've always kind of been an in-the-moment kind of person. I don't think that far in advance or have any idea what's around the next corner.

We always write way more than we put on a record. We always write a lot-lot.

It's fun to just get out there and have a nice conversation when I'm running. To be honest, when I do longer runs, the trail that I like to run up in Malibu has mountain lions, so I always feel I want to run with someone else.

I feel creatively vibrant. I have some great friends; I feel like I'm capable of giving a lot to the world. And ultimately, that's what I really care about, is just giving.

When I got with Nina Greenberg, I had been running for a few months already without a trainer. But then she gave me a program and guided me through my runs, showing me how to take care of myself and letting me know I should ice my legs and stretch - stuff I hadn't been doing.

I always thought I was a pretty terrible actor.

We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything we bring - the people and the equipment - must serve us in that goal.

LSD was good to me. Opening me up to another dimension, it helped me see what life was for, and the purpose of my yearnings... In a conscious way, it stripped away my fear of being criticized and freed me from the petty judgements I often doled out. Dissolving my ego, it magnified what was truly important, and unmasked those things that sapped my vital energy and distracted me from the path of divine beauty.

I'm always put in the unfortunate position of asking people to donate money and people I know in bands to play benefit concerts and all this stuff.

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am.

When I was a kid, and it was time to go to college, I thought, 'College is for people who don't have the street smarts to make it on their own - get in a band, get in a van, and get rockin'.

Anything worth doing good takes a little chaos.

Such a fool was I. It's a fool who's seduced by that which feels good. Nothing but a simple fool.

I love my life and my mistakes and my triumphs - all of it.

For me, music was the only reason I went to school. I was kind of a street kid, in a lot of trouble committing crimes and stuff. Music gave me something to focus on.

I like the idea of acting. Of all these things I've done, sometimes I think I've done well, and sometimes I think I didn't do well, but they are more cameos, and I come in and be crazy.

When something comes up, and it's interesting, and I have the time, I'll do it.

For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

I did record a bunch of stuff, but the thing that usually stops me from doing that is that I'm a terrible singer. I made a bunch of instrumental music, and it feels really good, but just as a singer, I'm not good.

I'm a performer and have managed to get my performing into the mainstream consciousness of the world, I guess.

I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.

When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.

Lucky enough, through the public school system, I had been able to have some music education, and that gave me something to focus on, and discipline - like a family to feel part of. There was a healthy family.

When Hillel died, it was during one of the happiest times of my life. I was married and completely in love and had a baby on the way.

I studied music at the most remedial level when I was a kid, through the Los Angeles public schools, with a little private instruction.

The Silverlake Conservatory is a nonprofit music school in Los Angeles where we teach music, mostly to kids, but to people of all ages - people who are old, people with beards, all kinds of people.

While reading, all my confusion and hurt dissolved, and when I reentered reality, I was a little bit better of a person, a little more capable of learning from my missteps.

The last thing that should happen is funding cut for education; it should be increased. We need to put more money towards education, and anything else is abusive.

What you do now can fuck you up later for real.

I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'

Steven Adler and I played football in the street when we were 12. I remember rehearsing in my bedroom with my first band, and some kid climbed over the fence of my backyard and peeked his head in the window to see who was rocking. It was Slash.

All my career, all that I've really done has been based on emotion and intuition and gravitating toward what sounds good.

I've been saved again and again by angels all around me. Not just from the insane stupidity of banging blow, but from becoming an aimless flounderer. A person who maybe talked a good line about doing shit but never ever put in the word to see things through. I could've easily dug myself into a hole, become someone who never got a clear picture off cause and effect, holistic health, or emotional well-being. I bow before the guardian angels that always showed me a light and a way up. My sanctuaries of friendship, books, basketball, music, and nature kept me sane.

It's so easy to fall into a comfortable groove in life where you do the things that you like, and because of that, often times, we don't grow or change because we're not pushing ourselves.

Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.

I had a friend who had been teaching music for a long time, and he knew a bunch of teachers, so I just put up the money and started a school.

When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

I fell deeply in love with the books of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. They parented me, and gave me a sense of what it was to be a decent person, without any of the usual hypocritical rhetoric. They fired my imagination and opened me up... they gave me the soul nutrients I needed... He taught me that it was fun and beautiful to be humble, and that human beings are no more important than rutabagas. That we've got to love with all we are, not for some reward down the line, but purely for the sake of being a loving person, and that creativity was the highest part of ourselves to engage... His humorous detachment from the world's insane and egotistical violence - "So it goes" - my first hint of a spiritual concept.

I started playing trumpet when I was 11 years old. All I wanted to be was a jazz trumpet player when I grew up.

Music is like the genius of humankind, universal ... People who have never really taken the time to get into music, their lives are a lot smaller. Kids deserve the richness and dimension of it in their lives.

The physicality and speed of the music, the sheer free abandon of the crown and the band joining together pulsing as one. Something awakened in me. I realized music could jar people out of their comfort zone, challenge them as to the very meaning of their existence. All the times in my life I'd wanted to disrupt things, to shake things up, and I now saw it being done in the healthiest way. Real alchemy. I fell in love with punk rock.

I exercise; I have a big career. I'm a parent, and I run a music school.

A big part of my life is music education because it changed my life - but arts, academics and athletics should all be equally treated in the school.

Music gave me something that was not only good for me - it gave me something to work on, something to be proud of and something that I really loved and have a love for - but also music was good for other people because you put joy into the world.

Ethiopia is such a great country, beautiful place.