Peter Hammill Quotes

#1. If you're going to have a heart attack, mine was the kind to have. I'm thankful that it hasn't affected my output or my capacity to perform. And it has given me a lot to think and write about.

Peter Hammill

#2. Nearly all web publications are driven by the display model, which is in turn driven by page views. But we all know the web is shifting, thanks to mobile devices and the walled gardens they erect. The new landscape of the web is far more complicated, and new products must emerge.

John Battelle

#3. Marc Almond has done a couple of covers, a few people in Europa have done them. I own all the publishing. It's never really been addressed, as I haven't had the time to go out and tout the songs.

Peter Hammill

#4. There's always a Van der Graaf audience that wants to hear the band's sound. And totally fair enough. Why not? It's a band. You like the band, you like the band.

Peter Hammill

#5. Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.

Peter Hammill

#6. I'll never find a better time to be alive than now.

Peter Hammill

#7. Republicans aren't interested in a one-sentence fix unless that sentence is, 'Obamacare is repealed.'

John Barrasso

#8. Every year on your birthday, you get a chance to start new.

Sammy Hagar

#9. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

Miranda July

#10. A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book.

Peter Hammill

#11. More people seem to know the Van der Graaf Generator material than my solo work - thanks, I suppose, to their parents' lingering vinyl collections.

Peter Hammill

#12. Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

Stephen R. Bissette

#13. I continue to believe, contrary to the given wisdom, that it's more interesting to have an album - or, indeed, an individual song - which has variety rather than homogeneity.

Peter Hammill

#14. My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

Peter Hammill

#15. He is trying to decide which of two daydreams he will inhabit.

Peter Hammill

#16. I do flip between being chatty and argumentative - and being a psycho-loner werewolf.

Peter Hammill

#17. My dictum has always been: 'This show is happening just here, just tonight, with these people who are in this hall, and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's done.'

Peter Hammill

#18. I suppose, in a way, one could say I may be less interested in my career than the audience is. Not to mean that I'm disinterested in my career, but I don't see it in terms of one stepping stone or, 'Now I'm going to go into my blue phase,' or what have you.

Peter Hammill

#19. What I love doing is taking my dog for runs.

Seann William Scott

#20. To be honest, I don't know really what I do on stage.

Peter Hammill

#21. The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it's true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres.

Peter Hammill

#22. The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.

Peter Hammill

#23. I think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.

Drew Magary

#24. Seriously, these days I tend to shut up in terms of external analysis and DO try to let things speak for themselves, while still trying to get some depth into them.

Peter Hammill

#25. I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

Peter Hammill

#26. It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.

Peter Hammill

#27. So I, for one, didn't feel alienated by what happened in 77.

Peter Hammill

#28. I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

Peter Hammill

#29. I'm not sure that Jesuits ever produce faithful Catholics. Because they're too fierce. It is Sturm und Drang, and it is guilt - it is all that battlefield stuff.

Peter Hammill

#30. Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.

Peter Hammill