Jarvis Cocker Quotes

Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance.

You can do anything when you're famous. That's why famous people are so dumb.

It's good that I managed to hoodwink so many people. I am actually not that nice a person.

It’s interesting that most gadgets are called ‘iPhone’ and ‘iPod,’ with that ‘i’ prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led – a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you’re not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You’ve got to let the subconscious in – that’s my main message to the world.

Paris is like a beautiful woman, but she's very haughty, she's not interested in you. She's very nice to look at but you can't quite get it together with her.

But I've got ideas. I keep my little notebook, I've always got that with me. Hopefully there's more stuff than nonsense in there.

I'm always nervous when I perform anyway.

In no way am I supporting or suggesting that a Conservative government is a good thing, far from it.

[Jeffrey Lewis is] The best lyricist working in the US today.

Also, because people like to multitask, in a way if you've got a bit of music on in the background and the lyrical content is making you want to listen to it, then that would probably put you off the texting you wanted to do. I think people like things that just make that right kind of noise, but leave your brain free to do something else.

Hollywood is called Hollywood, but holly doesn't grow there. Right from the start it's based on a lie. But it's a very seductive lie, and we're still entranced by it.

Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening; the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.

Don't think that the things around you don't count, because they do.

It's funny how you can intensely investigate one very particular thing, and then it can lead you to other things through links and stuff like that. It's like you're going on this selective, very precise detour. But then it is strange because with it being so quick, there must be a difference.

I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.

Pulp existed for 12 years before we got famous. Now, you could say that was just lack of imagination, but it's some kind of quality isn't it? Tenacity. You could also say it was sloth.

Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.

I guess I'm fairly insistent and maybe consistent. If I decide I'll do something, I generally will.

I do write songs with a political dimension to them sometimes, but I'm always slightly appalled by it when I do.

France is a republic, and the rules in theory have been made by everyone rather than imposed by a dictatorship or king or whatever. So it's like, we've got to stick to these rules because we made them.

I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.

I always thought that I might retire from any form of sexuality by the age of 40 and just become a dignified older person.

I'd never really wanted to have a really 'private' life before. But when somebody starts delving into it and printing details through the tabloids for shagging people you shouldn't have shagged, then that probably made me shy away a bit more from giving too much away.

Money isn't important, but you have to have enough, so you don't have to think about it. Thinking about money is a drag.

We've always been a bit out of touch with reality.

Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance. It's always been about trying to get to know people. Albeit, it's a bit of a contradiction because you can't really get to know people when they're 10 feet away and there's a big mass of them.

You know when you're thinking about what you want to be when you grow up, or how you want your life to pan out. I couldn't imagine anything better than living in a hotel so you'd never have to worry about washing up, making the bed, anything like that, and having a servant to come in and play all your favourite TV programmes.

I got a pair of red, synthetic satin women's pants through the post the other day with a phone number on. That was quite strange. I haven't tried the phone number. In times of stress I may.

Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong.

The thing with Disney songs is they're very manipulative, very sentimental, but they do get you, you know - there's a kind of sadness to them and that kind of music doesn't really exist any more.

If you're in a band or think of yourself as a slightly creative person, you can get quite self-indulgent, so sometimes it's nice to have those people who bring you down to earth, but in a pleasant way.

Noise is an easy thing to hide behind. If you make a lot of noise and shout behind that, nobody can tell what you're singing.

I'd been thinking I'd have to learn how to play really well, but obviously the message of punk was that you just learn three chords in a week and you're away.

In a song you can kind of stage-manage everything so that it puts you in a good light. And once a song is recorded, it always performs well.

You have to create a bespoke cultural environment. I know this may be a kind of thing that an old person says, but I feel to quite a large extent I was reared by the TV I watched.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It's like we've found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can't do that. It's an overabundance of information.

My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.

Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

I think that's what all art is for - for people to express what it is to be human. That's the purpose of it.

One of the problems of our modern world is that there's a lot of things to work through, but, at some point, everybody should take a pause from that and make something, so that it's not just all one-way traffic.

If you perform on a stage or you sing a song, it's like you sing your song, and then the words go into the air, and then they go into somebody's body through their ears, so it's kind of like penetrating somebody. It's kind of like having sex with somebody - but, obviously, from a great distance.

Often people poopoo melody as if it's a cheap trick to make people like things, but in my experience it's the hardest part of the tune, to find something that doesn't immediately remind you of something that's happened before.

I'm always amazed by people who blog all the time and tweet all the time, and still get things done. I don't know how they do it.

The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.

A song can't be completely serious if you rhyme melodic with alcoholic.

It's weird: The leader of the Conservative Party in England is two years younger than me, and I still don't really feel like a responsible adult.

In some ways, I always thought you're better off behaving like a rock star when you're a normal person. Because if you do it as a rock star, you'll end up in the papers and your life will be made a misery.