Top 100 Townshend Quotes
#1. Pete Townshend is one of my greatest influences. More than any other guitarist, he taught me how to play rhythm guitar and demonstrated its importance, particularly in a three-piece band.
Alex Lifeson
#2. We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. - Irving Townshend, Separate Lives
Michael Korda
#3. I wouldn't be windmilling a Fender Telecaster if it weren't for Pete Townshend.
Bruce Springsteen
#4. I wanted to be a writer when I was a little kid. Then I wanted to be Pete Townshend - the songwriting guitarist who occasionally sang.
Travis Morrison
#5. Pete Townshend used to crash chords and let the guitar feed back. He's overrated.
Ritchie Blackmore
#6. Announcer - "And where are you from Pete?"
Pete Townshend - "London, I'm from London."
Announcer - "London where, exactly?"
Pete - "London, England
Pete Townshend
#7. Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend. It would look ridiculous to do what we're doing now when I'm 40. That's why I want to destroy my career before it's too late.
Kurt Cobain
#8. I kept the first Rickenbacker I ever got, a little short-scale John Lennon-type model. And I've got a couple of 12-string models, which are really nice, and I've got a Pete Townshend model, which Pete gave me a few years ago. But that's about it.
Paul Weller
#9. Peter Townshend shows us it's all right to grow up. There is dignity after rock'n'roll.
Sting
#10. Look. I was a superhero in the '90s. I said so at the time. McCartney, Weller, Townshend, Richards, my first album's better than all their first albums. Even they'd admit that.
Noel Gallagher
#11. 'The Who' created the Daltrey/Townshend Center at UCLA for teenage hospital patients with cancer. It's the only one of its kind.
Nolan Sotillo
#12. Is your perception of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' so shallow that it's violated by dancing raisins?
Pete Townshend
#13. 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
#14. I want to get inside your bitter mind and see what I can find.
Pete Townshend
#15. The fact of the matter is, I'm f**king brilliant. Not 'was' brilliant. 'Am' brilliant.
Pete Townshend
#16. Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.
Pete Townshend
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
Pete Townshend
#21. I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything
Pete Townshend
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.
Pete Townshend
#25. Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.
Pete Townshend
#26. My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.
Pete Townshend
#27. His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath.
Pete Townshend
#29. So remember when you're looking for trouble
That trouble is already busy with weaker men
Pete Townshend
#31. 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
#32. Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.
Pete Townshend
#33. 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.
Pete Townshend
#34. Beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.
Pete Townshend
#35. 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.
Pete Townshend
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.
Pete Townshend
#40. When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.
Pete Townshend
#41. In 1945 music had a serious purpose; to defy post war depression & revitalize the romantic & hopeful aspirations of an exhausted ppl.
Pete Townshend
#42. I've learned a huge amount because I've been tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted.
Pete Townshend
#43. 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
#44. Give blood, but you may find that blood is not enough.
Pete Townshend
#45. 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
#46. Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind.
Pete Townshend
#47. Tough boys running the streets, come a little closer. Rough toys under the sheets, nobody knows her.
Pete Townshend
#48. 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.
Pete Townshend
#49. I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.
Pete Townshend
#50. Water is more precious than oil. Both are more precious than music. Music won't heat a house or help a plant to grow.
Pete Townshend
#51. Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.
Pete Townshend
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Looking back, I don't know why we needed it to be quite so loud all the time.
Pete Townshend
#56. The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter.
Pete Townshend
#57. 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
#58. I respect those who follow religious routes only if they seem to me to be morally proper and in accord with the modern world.
Pete Townshend
#59. 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
#61. I am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.
Pete Townshend
#62. I think we are incumbent, I am incumbent, the Who is incumbent, anybody that produces anything by me is incumbent by my Englishness.
Pete Townshend
#63. Dance is the only thing that lets you lose yourself and find yourself at the same time.
Pete Townshend
#64. We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.
Pete Townshend
#65. I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.
Pete Townshend
#66. Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.
Pete Townshend
#67. No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned
Pete Townshend
#68. Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.
Pete Townshend
#69. 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
#70. If I were to have my own brand of guitars, they would have to be industructable.
Pete Townshend
#71. I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch my father's clarinets or saxophones, just my harmonica.
Pete Townshend
#72. 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.
Pete Townshend
#73. 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.
Pete Townshend
#74. 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
#75. I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.
Pete Townshend
#76. Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.
Pete Townshend
#77. It's terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.
Pete Townshend
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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.
Pete Townshend
#81. 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.
Pete Townshend
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions.
Pete Townshend
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.
Pete Townshend
#95. The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.
Pete Townshend
#96. 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
#97. 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
#100. 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
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