Top 100 Lou Reed Quotes
#1. I had started also studying because I wanted to learn more about power and fighting.
Lou Reed
#2. Things always seem to end before they start
Lou Reed
#3. Here's to Mulberry Jane
She made jam when she came
Somebody cut off her feet
Now jelly rolls in the street.
Lou Reed
#4. I'm tearing down Route 80 East, the sun's on my right side. I'm drunk, but my vision's good.
Lou Reed
#5. Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.
Lou Reed
#6. People think that I work out but it's all t'ai chi.
Lou Reed
#7. I'm an artist and that means I can be as egotistical as I want to be.
Lou Reed
#8. I don't think I'm in any position to call myself a martial artist. I'm a student of the martial arts.
Lou Reed
#9. I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.
Lou Reed
#10. You can't always trust your mother.
Lou Reed
#11. I tried to give up drugs by drinking.
Lou Reed
#12. When I saw that combination of grace and power, the fast and the soft, the yin and the yang, that's what I'd been looking for.
Lou Reed
#13. Speaking in a common tongue, speaking through guitars and drums.
Lou Reed
#14. It's the music that kept us all intact, kept us from going crazy.
Lou Reed
#15. I don't think anybody is anybody else's moral compass. Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is.
Lou Reed
#16. Meditation doesn't have to be complicated. What I do is about as simple as you can get. You could just count the beads, one, two, three, with your eyes closed or open, whatever makes you happy.
Lou Reed
#18. I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.
Lou Reed
#19. The injuries we do in kind are visited upon us often. In the science of the mind, trying hard to move a shadow.
Lou Reed
#20. Take a walk on the wild side.
Lou Reed
#21. First thing you learnis that you'vealways got to wait
Lou Reed
#22. The music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music?
Lou Reed
#23. You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.
Lou Reed
#24. I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.
Lou Reed
#25. When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.
Lou Reed
#26. How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?
Lou Reed
#27. Some even claim that I'm a terror, a dictator and they're right.
Lou Reed
#28. Life's like a mayonnaise soda.
Lou Reed
#29. If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.
Lou Reed
#30. When you're growing up in a small town
You know you'll grow down in a small town
There is only one good use for a small town
You hate it and you know you'll have to leave.
Lou Reed
#31. You won't see my parents honored on any stamps.
Lou Reed
#32. I cleaned up my act because otherwise I would have kicked the bucket.
Lou Reed
#33. Moving on has allowed me to know who I am and to be present in all that I do. I take this forward in my work and in my personal relationships. It is a powerful program and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to move on with their life.
Lou Reed
#34. Some people drink to unleash their libidos, and other people drink to prop up their egos.
Lou Reed
#35. Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry.
Lou Reed
#36. I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable ... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running.
Lou Reed
#37. It's just a temporary thing.
Lou Reed
#38. You know the expression 'God protects fools and drunks'? I qualify for both.
Lou Reed
#39. I've gone out with my shotgun. This is hunting country out there. You better run.
Lou Reed
#40. Does anyone need yet another politician caught with his pants down and money sticking in his hole?
Lou Reed
#41. Sound is more than just noise. Ordered sound is music. My life is music.
Lou Reed
#42. But I found tai chi when I was studying with Leung Shum, who teaches Eagle Claw and Wu Hao.
Lou Reed
#43. If someone teaches you alignment and - I'm not a tai chi expert by any stretch - so interviewing me about tai chi is kind of the cart before the horse - but just from my point of view as a student, it's simply that Master Ren can show you the relationship of power, stance and form.
Lou Reed
#44. I wouldn't want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It's very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don't have the bass, it's like being amputated. It's like you have no legs.
Lou Reed
#45. I shot a vein in my neck and coughed up a quaalude.
Lou Reed
#46. I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there.
Lou Reed
#47. I can concentrate on my art.
Lou Reed
#48. The baby sits in front of MTV watching violent fantasies, while Dad guzzles beer with his favorite sport only to find his heroes all coked up.
Lou Reed
#49. It's interesting to have a conglomeration of people that covers the strata from A to Z ... There's a certain element of the audience that's intellectually oriented, into the lyrics ... then there's another element of the audience that's into a sex trip. I'm into both of them.
Lou Reed
#50. I've made love to my mother, killed my father, and my brother. What am I to do?
Lou Reed
#51. I don't mind a repetitive chorus; I mind repetitive verse. I mean, it's the same amount of space. Why would you have only three diamonds if you can have six?
Lou Reed
#52. I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage.
Lou Reed
#53. I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.
Lou Reed
#54. I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.
Lou Reed
#55. All the people have gone to war leaving no interrogator to mind.
Lou Reed
#56. Jealousy endlessly eats through my mind, and jealously endlessly makes me be unkind.
Lou Reed
#57. Dear Pope, send me some hope or a rope.
Lou Reed
#58. Anyone who ever had a heart,
He wouldn't turn around and break it.
Anyone who ever played a part,
he wouldn't turn around and fake it.
Sweet Jane
Lou Reed
#59. You've gotta blow the roof off of your heart and let the universe in.
Lou Reed
#60. I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming.
Lou Reed
#61. I always believed that I have something important to say and I said it.
Lou Reed
#62. There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
Lou Reed
#63. Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.
Lou Reed
#64. If anyone ever had a heart
He wouldn't turn around and break it
If anyone ever played a part
he wouldn't turn around and hate it.
Lou Reed
#65. To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.
Lou Reed
#66. The currents rage so deep upon us, this is the age of video violence.
Lou Reed
#67. I can't do anything I want to. I mean, I can't have my own TV show. I can't have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums.
Lou Reed
#68. This violent rage that turned inward cannot be helped by drink.
Lou Reed
#69. And I feel just like Jesus' son
Lou Reed
#70. When he beat my mother it made me so mad.
Lou Reed
#71. There is only one good thing about small town
You know that you want to get out
Lou Reed
#72. The myriad choices of his fate
Set themselves out upon a plate
For him to choose
What had he to lose
Lou Reed
#73. Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she. She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.
Lou Reed
#74. There are problems in these times, but none of them are mineI'm beginning to see the light
Lou Reed
#75. But I'm also talented and I know when I created something great and Perfect Night is something great, no doubt, no but.
Lou Reed
#76. You're going to reap just what you sow
Lou Reed
#77. Teach them about anger, the sin that comes with dawning. Teach them about flowers, and the beauty of forgiveness.
Lou Reed
#78. It's fun to be in a small club and to be able to look somebody right in the eye and watch them just freak. Then it's fun to be in front of thousands of people and watch a couple of hundred freaking out of their minds.
Lou Reed
#80. There were lots of things that I recognized from my experience with Eagle Claw and Wu Hao, and here was the combination of the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole tamale in one.
Lou Reed
#81. What I really love is my scotch. It's the power, the power of positive drinking.
Lou Reed
#82. When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside your twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands cause I see you. I'll be you mirror.
Lou Reed
#83. Over what guilty spirit to not hear the beating, to not hear the beating, but only tears of perfect moan, only tears of perfect moan.
Lou Reed
#84. I love Ornette Coleman. I love Don Cherry. I love the way those guys play.
Lou Reed
#85. These are really terribly rough times, and we really should try to be as nice to each other as possible.
Lou Reed
#86. Herpes, AIDS, the Middle East at full throttle. Better check that sausage before you put it in the waffle.
Lou Reed
#87. The president's dead, no one can find his head, its been missing for two weeks. But no one seemed to notice it.
Lou Reed
#88. You know, when you're relaxed, you're putting it out there, and then it comes, oh, I can do that.
Lou Reed
#89. One thing I've often thought is that I never want to tell anybody else what to do. It's hard enough to figure out what I want to do.
Lou Reed
#90. I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.
Lou Reed
#91. The sickness of the mother runs on through the girl, leaving her small and helpless. Liquor flies through her brain with the force of a gun, leaving her running in circles.
Lou Reed
#92. I've always believed that there's an amazing number of things you can do through a rock'n'roll song and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat,
Lou Reed
#93. You do this because you like it, you think what you're making is beautiful. And if you think it's beautiful, maybe they think it's beautiful.
Lou Reed
#94. My attitude is that you very rarely come in contact with someone of Master Ren's level, so every opportunity I could get to learn from him I wanted to do that.
Lou Reed
#95. I don't believe in dressing up reality. I don't believe in using makeup to make things look smoother.
Lou Reed
#96. Well all tai chi has the martial aspect to it, a lot of people don't know, a lot of the teachers won't show it, or they do show it but you don't really learn it, what the application is.
Lou Reed
#97. For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.
Lou Reed
#98. As you practice things, you get better. I mean I've worked very hard on changing my life and taking what is good about it and trying to jettison the things I think were not good about it. I think the key word is "discipline," focus. I'm always working at it, but I'm not always successful.
Lou Reed
#99. I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.
Lou Reed
#100. Honey, I'm a cocksucker, what are you?
Lou Reed
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