Quotes About Velvet Underground

#1. The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

Brian Eno

#2. Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

Charles Hazlewood

#3. The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

Tom Stoppard

#4. I knew about things like Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground, weirdly, before I knew about David Bowie. I didn't know what David Bowie was, when I was a kid. I thought he was like Visage.

Stewart Lee

#5. I like Velvet Underground, but I was never really hardcore into them. I like them, and I like Nico, but I won't front like I'm super knowledgeable. I just never got around to it.

Eric Andre

#6. I like their darkness but I also like the pop-side of the Velvet Underground.

Martin Gore

#7. As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too.

Ric Ocasek

#8. When a band becomes as truly iconic as the Velvet Underground, there will often be a box set released, overburdened with mediocre material that dilutes what was fine left on its own.

Henry Rollins

#9. When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.

Moby

#10. I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

Dean Wareham

#11. As a teen, I heard the second Velvet Underground album, 'White Light/White Heat,' and it was too much for my limited scope of appreciation. It was intense, but I didn't get it.

Henry Rollins

#12. I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

Courtney Love

#13. I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and they were one of the most important bands, for me.

Martin Gore

#14. I grew up in the '90s. I listened to a lot of The Clash, Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. I wasn't into Boyzone, or anything.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

#15. As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

Moby

#16. Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.

Peter Bart

#17. No part of Manhattan these days really has the same vibe I get from a Ramones song or a Velvet Underground song.

Ezra Koenig

#18. When I was very little, I was into Michael Jackson. At six or seven, it was Madonna, but she's not what she used to be. I've been into everything from Edith Piaf to Joe Strummer to the Velvet Underground to Suicide to A Tribe Called Quest to African music.

Lykke Li

#19. It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.

Dean Wareham

#20. Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.

Brian Eno

#21. What are you?" I hold my breath, waiting.
"Broken," she murmurs

Cheryl McIntyre

#22. Information is the hardest currency.

Andrew Vachss

#23. All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family "The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father." 1854 The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother.

Chief Seattle

#24. Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.

Philip K. Dick

#25. If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole;
Go burrow underground.

Elinor Wylie

#26. I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

Mark Twain