Pete Townshend Quotes:

The day you open your mind to music, you're halfway to opening your mind to life.

source: - "Pop Chronicles", Show 23, digital.library.unt.edu. May 02, 1968.

Topics: Music, Mind, Opening, Opening Your Mind

Respect yourself. Try to remember that not everything in life can be perfect. You will make mistakes. That's inevitable. But you are not ugly. You will only be ugly when you behave in an ugly way.

Topics: Mistake, Perfect, Trying

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

Topics: Hearing, Trouble, Deaf, Refining

I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything

Topics: Believe, Rocks, Vehicle

Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play.

Topics: Song, Jesus, Play

Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.

Topics: Moon, Glasses, Doors

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.

Topics: Men, Feels

The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.

Topics: Pounds, Cost, Equipment

Keith Moon is not interested in Jazz and won't ever be a Jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at.

Topics: Moon, Keith, Jazz

I played the guitar for ten years before I realized it wasn't a weapon.

Topics: Guitar, Years, Weapons

Deep inside of every human being is this feeling that nothing is ever going to be complete, that the circle will never connect - and that itself is the secret to infinity.

Topics: Frustration, Circles, Feelings

Rock music is important to people , because it allows them to escape this crazy world. It allows them not to run away from the problems that are there, but to face up to them , but at the same time sort of DANCE ALL OVER THEM. That's what rock and roll is about.

Topics: Running, Crazy, Rocks, Crazy World, This Crazy World

When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.

Topics: Color, Interesting, Entertainment, Color And Life

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

Topics: Rocks, Inspirational Music, Might

Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.

Topics: Enjoy Life, Praying, Remember

What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

Topics: Order, People, Theatre

I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'

Topics: Rock And Roll, Mirrors, Rocks

It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along.

Topics: Music, Song, Moving

Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll.

Topics: Wind, Events, Curls

The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

Topics: Horse, Mistake, Average, Law Of Averages

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.

Topics: Color, Play, Culture

People try to put us down (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Hope I die before I get old.

Topics: People, Trying, Looks

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

Topics: Black And White, Color, Television

I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.

Topics: Anger, Proportion, Blur

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around

Topics: Drinking, Way, Would Be

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

Topics: Art, Denial, Way

Your love is like heroin.

Topics: Love Is, Love Is Like, Heroin

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.

Topics: Yesterday, Play, Today

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood.

Topics: Gay, Men, Rivers, Mods, Macho

Dance is the only thing that lets you lose yourself and find yourself at the same time.

Topics: Dancing, Finding Yourself, Losing Yourself

Is your perception of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' so shallow that it's violated by dancing raisins?

Topics: Dancing, Perception, Shallow, Raisins, Grapevine

There's no easy way to be free.

source: - Song: Slip Kid

Topics: Way, Easy, Easy Way

Young and old will sit and judge unfeeling, while the empty churches' bells are pealing. And the green hills lay ignored, untended, lonely watchers remain unbefriended.

Topics: Lonely, Judging, Poetry, Watchers, Unfeeling

Parade your pallor in iniquity.

source: - Song: Give Blood, Album: White City: A Novel

Topics: Parades, Explanation, Iniquity

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

Topics: Men, Machines, Explanation

We won't get fooled again!

Topics: Activism, Fooled

I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today.

Topics: Drama, Thinking, Artist, Well Rounded

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

Topics: Facts, Adages

Prayer TV looks like pay TV to me.

Topics: Religious, Prayer, Religion

Give blood, but you may find that blood is not enough.

Topics: Blood, Giving, May, Giving Blood

I want to get inside your bitter mind and see what I can find.

Topics: Revenge, Mind, Want

Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind.

Topics: Philosophy, Mind, Causes

I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.

Topics: Strong, Philosophy, Passion

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

Topics: Father, Guitar, Style, Clarinet, Synthesizers

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

Topics: Rocks, Rock And Roll, World

If it screams truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong, but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock n' roll.

Topics: Rocks, Blood, Rock N Roll

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

Topics: Law, Class, Long, Class System, Ending Poverty

I smash guitars because I like them.

Topics: Funny, Music, Guitar

I want to age with some dignity.

Topics: Age, Want, Dignity

Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday / And I get on my knees and pray.

source: - "Song: "Won't Get Fooled Again" ("Who’s Next")". 1971.

Topics: Guitar, Play, Yesterday

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts.

Topics: Hurt

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

Topics: Song, Pain, Thinking

We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.

Topics: Inspirational, Fool, Plans

No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned

source: - Song: Slit Skirts, Album: All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, 2006

Topics: Flames, Fool, Burned

The fact of the matter is, I'm f**king brilliant. Not 'was' brilliant. 'Am' brilliant.

Topics: Kings, Matter, Facts

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

Topics: Writing, Rocks, Rock And Roll, Accompany, Rite

If you don't want anyone to know anything about you, don't write anything.

Topics: Writing, Want, Knows

For an electric guitarist to solo effectively on an acoustic guitar you need to develop tricks to avoid the expectation of sustain that comes from playing electrics. Try cascades, for example. Drop arpeggios over open strings, and let the open strings sing as you pick with your fingers. It's kind of a country style of playing, but it works very well in-between heavily strummed parts and fingered lead lines.

Topics: Country, Guitar, Expectations, Cascade, Acoustic Guitar

I want fast food, pretty naked girls preferably tattooed.

source: - Song: Fast Food, 2006

Topics: Girl, Quality, Naked

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

source: - "Spokesman for a generation", www.cnn.com. January 14, 2003.

Topics: Teenage, Past, Trouble

The Who is now a brand, not a band; but it is a brand that is upheld by its audience, not an industry or a cynical moneymaking machine.

Topics: Cynical, Band, Machines

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high you'd laugh and say nothing that simple, but you've been told many times before messiah's point you to the door though no one's got the guts to leave the temple.

Topics: Simple, Doors, Laughing, Messiah

Even as age humbles me it feeds my arrogance. There is still nothing that interests me as much as myself.

Topics: Arrogance, Age, Interest

Any fool can hide, few can play.

Topics: Play, Fool

Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.

Topics: Rocks, Important, Ridiculous

Once she woke with untamed lover's face between her legs, now he's cooled and stifled and it's she who has to beg.

Topics: Sex, Untamed, Legs

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

source: - Song: Substitute

Topics: Song, Spoons, Mouths, Silver Spoons

It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.

Topics: Responsibility, Thinking, People, Make Me Angry

What the English like to do is to face reality with a glass of port and a tear and fade off like Basil Rathbone into the sunset.

Topics: Sunset, Reality, Glasses, Basil

I don't need to fight / To prove I'm right / I don't need to be forgiven

source: - Song: Baba O'Riley

Topics: Fighting, Needs, Prove

He is the king. If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar.

source: - "Link Wray" by Garth Cartwright, www.theguardian.com. November 21, 2005.

Topics: Kings, Guitar, Links, Rumble

I'll spend my mornings at the sunshine café.

source: - Song: Brilliant Blues

Topics: Inspirational, Morning, Sunshine

I don't really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue.

Topics: Inspirational, Dance, Dad, Post War

Give love, and keep blood between brothers

source: - Song: Give Blood, Album: White City: A Novel

Topics: Brother, Blood, Giving

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.

Topics: Jobs, Gun, Men, Machine Guns

If I were to have my own brand of guitars, they would have to be industructable.

Topics: Guitar, Brands, My Own

We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.

source: - "The Who goes on after Entwistle death", www.cnn.com. July 1, 2002.

Topics: Worry, Musician, Tools

Looking back, I don't know why we needed it to be quite so loud all the time.

Topics: Loud, Needed, Knows

I respect those who follow religious routes only if they seem to me to be morally proper and in accord with the modern world.

source: - Interview with Rob Mitchum, pitchfork.com. October 16, 2006.

Topics: Religious, World, Modern

In the midnight of a soul's unsleeping, hear the waterfall of women weeping. Hear the distant noise of traffic stalling, hear the prostituted children calling.

source: - Song: Hiding Out, Album: White City: A Novel

Topics: Children, Reality, Soul, Stalling

I see a boy with his mother's ambition, performing for love, trained in submission.

Topics: Family, Mother, Ambition

Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired.

source: - "Listen (If You Can) to Pete". www.wired.com. January 04, 2006.

Topics: Loss, Hearing, Terrible, Hearing Loss, Terrible Things

Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.

Topics: Children, Two, Three

Don't cry Don't raise your eye Its only teenage wasteland.

source: - Song: Baba O'Riley

Topics: Teenage, Eye, Cry, Wasteland

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

Topics: Writing, Discipline, Finest

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

source: - Song: Goin' Mobile

Topics: Air, Gypsy

Good old Pete. That's me. But I find it hard to think of myself in the first person when I'm writing about The Who. So many times he has willingly sat down to write about the good old Who. Isn't he too old to masturbate?

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Firsts

Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you.

Topics: Kissing, Boys, Social Taboos

Tough boys running the streets, come a little closer. Rough toys under the sheets, nobody knows her.

source: - Song: Rough Boys, Album: Empty Glass, 2006

Topics: Running, Boys, Littles

Let my love open the door To yourheart.

source: - Song: Let My Love Open the Door, Album: Empty Glass, 2006

Topics: Life, Doors, Expression

Link is a quiet man to meet- easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside he gets very very mean very often. I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard Rumble , and yet very excited by the guitar sound. And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson. We met him in New York in 1970 while recording Who's Next.... this later inspired the b-side Wasp Man, a tune we dedicated to Link Wray.

Topics: New York, Mean, Men, Jagger, Quiet Man

It's terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.

Topics: Feelings, Bachelors, Terrible

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

Topics: Want, Pretending, Want Me

It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.

Topics: Song, Light, Rocks, Pinball, Encores

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

Topics: Stories, Passages, Rite, Rite Of Passage

For a while I was perfectly happy not performing with 'The Who.' From 1982 to 1989 I felt 'The Who' did not exist. I let the band go, in my heart. However, Roger Daltrey had other ideas. He would not let go.

Topics: Letting Go, Heart, Ideas

I've learned a huge amount because I've been tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted.

source: - "Won't get fooled again..." by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. December 28, 2003.

Topics: I've Learned, Trusted, Huge

It's an ordinary day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.

Topics: Ordinary Days, Brian, Died

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh...Songwriting is best. It's the hardest-finest-tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

Topics: Father, Character, Discipline

Here comes the new boss Same as the old boss.

Topics: Work, Boss

Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.

source: - Interview with Rob Mitchum, pitchfork.com. October 16, 2006.

Topics: Data, Doe, World

Water is more precious than oil. Both are more precious than music. Music won't heat a house or help a plant to grow.

source: - Interview with Rob Mitchum, pitchfork.com. October 16, 2006.

Topics: Oil, Water, House

I am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.

source: - "Generation terrorists" by Simon Garfield, www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2006.

Topics: Song, Writing, Sondheim

Beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.

Topics: Beach, Real, Men

Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.

Topics: Thinking, Long, Rolling, Really Long

It's sad when people break up.

Topics: Break Up, Breakup, People

I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine.

Topics: Paris, Rolling, Records, Recording Studio, Barges

When people keep repeating That you'll never fall in love When everybody keeps retreating But you can't seem to get enough Let my love open the door Let my love open the door Let my love open the door To your heart.

source: - Song: Let My Love Open the Door

Topics: Life, Falling In Love, Heart, Never Fall In Love

Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

Topics: Rocks, Punk, Tsunami, Punk Rock

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

Topics: Drama, Thinking, Theatre

I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Years

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces I sing my heart out to the infinite sea I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains I sing my song to the free.

source: - Song: Song Is Over

Topics: Song, Heart, Space, Wide Open Spaces, Open Spaces

Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

Topics: Writing, Men, Political

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

Topics: Class, People, Hypocrisy, Modern English, Sad But True

There's a man upon that ledge, he's only cleaning windows. What a shame for the pain we're missing. Gonna lean back on my wall and pray for him to fall.

Topics: Wall, Pain, Fall

But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can.

Topics: Thinking, People, Interesting

I'M FREE! - I'm free, And freedom tastes of reality, I'm free - I'm free, An' I'm waiting for you to follow me.

source: - Richard Barnes, Pete Townshend (1977). “The story of Tommy”

Topics: Freedom, Reality, Waiting, Waiting For You

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

Topics: Mods, Happenings, Happening Again

What the Who is all about is exactly that and it always has been. If it exists today for this concert, it's in response again to a function which is happening out there on the street.

Topics: Today, Concerts, Function

I think we are incumbent, I am incumbent, the Who is incumbent, anybody that produces anything by me is incumbent by my Englishness.

Topics: Thinking, Produce, Incumbents

We have to focus on his early work, and just one or two of his movies, and elements of his TV shows, to keep his memory pure. People now know that Elvis could play a mean rhythm guitar himself, and needed no other musicians to perform a great song. But Elvis was not just a rock star, he was an all-round entertainer.

source: - Digital Spy, June 29, 2015.

Topics: Song, Stars, Memories, Early Work