"WE'LL NEVER BE AS YOUNG AS WE ARE RIGHT NOW."   -  "That's one of my favorite lines," Steinman explains. "I think it's a really startling statement. I'm totally fascinated with age and what times does to people, the fact that you have ghosts around you constantly, that you can't ever escape. `Peter Pan,' " he says, "is the ultimate rock-and-roll myth -- lost boys who don't grow up."

"I was looking out at the vista of violence that is LA - except out there they call it romantic violence - thinking about how I'd like to wipe away the stagnant dross of Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles with a single stroke. Then I saw this chemical fire in the distance. It was eerie - a blue and red haze everywhere. I felt like I was trapped in a jukebox."

"I think I'm obsessed with obsession and I think the dark side of love is the power to be obsessive. Love is one of the forces that can easily obsess and enslave and turn people into jelly. At any point in their lives, it can retrigger something that will enslave them."

"Anybody who’s obsessed is funny. But it’s also a noble sentiment. It’s about the most noble thing one can do - to be obsessed by a belief."

"Well, I'm not good at writing music that fits in, it's not what I do well, what I feel like doing."

On artist Richard Corben: "The intertwining of light and dark forces here, of love and decay, of unknown altars and inescapable tombs, of unchained gods and insatiable demons, of unending dreams and unyielding nightmares - all this is dazzling. With Corben, not only is anything possible - it is inevitable."

"I've been called over the top. How silly. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side."

The Apotheosis of Music: "The thing is that [Wanger and Little Richard] both amplified human beings. The Wagner material was about God and Little Richard sounded like God. It made me realize that you don’t have to remain a human being - that one of the great uses of art (which I’d only heard talked about as some valuable cultural asset that meant nothing to me) is that it was like taking a pill and you were no longer just a human being"

"Our songs are sardonic, operatic, desperate, extreme and really passionate. There's something dangerous to it - rock should have a mystic dimension. The fun is going over the edge."

"Our songs are a series of heroics. Amplification of reality, glorification's of fantasy."

"The songs are myths, panoramas, vistas, voyages - voyages to a country of lost girls and golden boys who refuse to grow up. It's a land everybody wants to get to, a rock kingdom in which the major theme is: all revved up with no place to go."

"My songs are anthems to those moments when you feel like you're on the head of a match that's burning. They're anthems to the essence of rock & roll, to a world that despises inaction and loves passion and rebellion, They're anthems to the kind of feeling you get listening to 'Be My Baby' by the Ronettes. That's what I love about anthems - the fury, the melody and the passion."

"There's so many things that have beautiful gods in them - y'know, amplifiers, guitars, motorcycles, girls' eyes, screams in the middle of New York City some nights, moons, there's millions of them."

"In a world full of cripples, the only pure revolutionary act is to get up and dance!"

"Then Sam, the only other conscious person in the room, said he'd like to levitate. I said, 'Just stay where you are, because everybody else is sinking.' Suddenly the image dawned as a powerful metaphor for rock & roll: when everybody else is sinking and going the way of L.A. music, when fever and passion become an air-conditioned thrill and fantasies become cluttered by tax-returns, rock & roll dreams come through."

"I don't know if there's any connection linguistically but a great showman to me is also a Shaman, in that tears open doorways and lets you see things behind doors that you would never see. And creates altars so you could worship things that you're not aware of. It shows you the underbelly and that's always interested me more than anything else. What, the secret underbelly of things."

"I was interested in gods and goddesses and people who thought they were gods and goddesses, or tried to be. I was interested in the massive scale, in nightmares, in dreams as opposed to reality. And things that went on in the subconscious rather than the ordinary daily life. Everything heightened or hidden away or secreted or amplified or mythic."