Top 100 Pete Townshend Quotes
#1. I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Pete Townshend
#2. I want to get inside your bitter mind and see what I can find.
Pete Townshend
#3. Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.
Pete Townshend
#4. 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.
Pete Townshend
#5. We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.
Pete Townshend
#6. I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.
Pete Townshend
#7. I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything
Pete Townshend
#8. 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.
Pete Townshend
#9. 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.
Pete Townshend
#10. We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.
Pete Townshend
#11. Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.
Pete Townshend
#12. His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath.
Pete Townshend
#13. So remember when you're looking for trouble
That trouble is already busy with weaker men
Pete Townshend
#15. 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.
Pete Townshend
#16. Beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.
Pete Townshend
#17. I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.
Pete Townshend
#19. For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.
Pete Townshend
#20. Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.
Pete Townshend
#21. 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.
Pete Townshend
#22. Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind.
Pete Townshend
#23. Tough boys running the streets, come a little closer. Rough toys under the sheets, nobody knows her.
Pete Townshend
#24. I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.
Pete Townshend
#25. Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.
Pete Townshend
#26. 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.
Pete Townshend
#27. 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.
Pete Townshend
#28. 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.
Pete Townshend
#29. The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter.
Pete Townshend
#30. Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.
Pete Townshend
#31. 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.
Pete Townshend
#33. I am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.
Pete Townshend
#34. Dance is the only thing that lets you lose yourself and find yourself at the same time.
Pete Townshend
#35. We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.
Pete Townshend
#36. I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.
Pete Townshend
#37. No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned
Pete Townshend
#38. Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.
Pete Townshend
#39. I saw the Internet as being something which would allow power mongers to control us, and that we would willingly go to that if it promised us salvation - if it promised to show us who we were and let us find ourselves as we had, uniquely in our generation, through rock music.
Pete Townshend
#40. If I were to have my own brand of guitars, they would have to be industructable.
Pete Townshend
#41. The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.
Pete Townshend
#42. Announcer - "And where are you from Pete?"
Pete Townshend - "London, I'm from London."
Announcer - "London where, exactly?"
Pete - "London, England
Pete Townshend
#43. Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.
Pete Townshend
#44. It's terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.
Pete Townshend
#45. 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.'
Pete Townshend
#46. To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world.
Pete Townshend
#47. Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they don't have, beauty they haven't worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.
Pete Townshend
#48. 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.
Pete Townshend
#49. 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.
Pete Townshend
#50. I needed to give back, give back, give back. I felt guilty about my success. I felt uncomfortable about how easily I had been delivered this extraordinary life that I had.
Pete Townshend
#51. A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.
Pete Townshend
#52. 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.
Pete Townshend
#54. 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.
Pete Townshend
#55. 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.
Pete Townshend
#56. I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.
Pete Townshend
#57. I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique.
Pete Townshend
#58. The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.
Pete Townshend
#59. 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.
Pete Townshend
#60. 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.
Pete Townshend
#63. I heard that Harry Nilsson had died. The secret to being a successful hellraiser, it seemed, was to stop raising hell before hell razed you.
Pete Townshend
#64. English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.
Pete Townshend
#65. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.
Pete Townshend
#66. I don't need to fight / To prove I'm right / I don't need to be forgiven
Pete Townshend
#67. Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them
Pete Townshend
#69. Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.
Pete Townshend
#70. 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.
Pete Townshend
#71. Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.
Pete Townshend
#75. If you don't want anyone to know anything about you, don't write anything.
Pete Townshend
#76. What we learned quite early on is what was really important to early British pop that we produced-and this is where we were distinct from almost everybody else in this respect-is that it had to reflect exactly what the audience wanted us to say.
Pete Townshend
#77. 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.
Pete Townshend
#78. It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along.
Pete Townshend
#79. 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.
Pete Townshend
#80. 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.
Pete Townshend
#81. 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.
Pete Townshend
#82. I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.
Pete Townshend
#83. It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.
Pete Townshend
#84. I played the guitar for ten years before I realized it wasn't a weapon.
Pete Townshend
#85. Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.
Pete Townshend
#86. When you're part of a gang, you soon find the parts of you that don't fit. These apparent defects can become assets; they're the things about you that make you interesting & useful.
Pete Townshend
#87. 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.
Pete Townshend
#88. 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.
Pete Townshend
#90. 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.
Pete Townshend
#91. In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief.
Pete Townshend
#93. 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.
Pete Townshend
#94. 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.
Pete Townshend
#98. 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.
Pete Townshend
#99. The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.
Pete Townshend
#100. 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.
Pete Townshend
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