Lou Reed Quotes

Some people drink to unleash their libidos, and other people drink to prop up their egos.

Electricity comes from other planets.

When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside your twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands cause I see you. I'll be you mirror.

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

I've become completely well adjusted to being a cult figure.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

I'm too old to do things by half

People didn't know certain things about me, which... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.

Eve kissed Able, that's how he got murdered by Cain.

You're going to reap just what you sow

The most important thing is work.

Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.

When I saw that combination of grace and power, the fast and the soft, the yin and the yang, that's what I'd been looking for.

Jealousy endlessly eats through my mind, and jealously endlessly makes me be unkind.

Why don't you swallow razor blades?

I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there.

I'm an artist and that means I can be as egotistical as I want to be.

I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.

I've found that from my point of view, the Chen style contained many things that I knew on a fairly superficial level from Eagle Claw, and that had Chen elements of what seemed to me the soft in Eagle Claw.

Looking through the viewfinder for me is like being in a movie theater. That's what I like about it.

I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look, a talking book that contained keys to past and present memories

I shot a vein in my neck and coughed up a quaalude.

You're a musician: You play. That's what you do.

Any human being should have a tolerance for anybody.

I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running.

I take drugs just because in the 20th century in a technological age living in the city there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman. Just to bring yourself up or down, but to attain equilibrium you need to take certain drugs. They don't getcha high even, they just getcha normal.

I'm still not sure I didn't die

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, that's what the Statue of Bigotry says. Your poor huddled masses, let's just club them to death, and get it over with.

It's fun to be in a small club and to be able to look somebody right in the eye and watch them just freak. Then it's fun to be in front of thousands of people and watch a couple of hundred freaking out of their minds.

The currents rage so deep upon us, this is the age of video violence.

It always bothers me to see people writing RIP when a person dies. It just feels so insincere and like a cop out. To me, RIP is the microwave dinner of posthumous honours.

I can concentrate on my art.

When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.

Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the chords. Deftly taking from all sources, old rock, Four Freshman, he got in his records a beautiful hybrid sound - Let Him Run Wild, Don't Worry Baby, I Get Around, Fun, Fun, Fun - 'and she had fun, fun, fun 'till her daddy took her T-bird away.'

If someone teaches you alignment and - I'm not a tai chi expert by any stretch - so interviewing me about tai chi is kind of the cart before the horse - but just from my point of view as a student, it's simply that Master Ren can show you the relationship of power, stance and form.

It's the music that kept us all intact, kept us from going crazy.

Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she. She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.

I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room.

I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage.

High energy does not necessarily mean fast, high energy has to do with heart.

I don't like overdubs, never liked them.

I don't really think about what the subject of my next album will be. I just know that I'm going to make another album.

I don't know what goes on in the crowd. I've had them show up and throw beer cans at me. I caused riots in most of the major cities.

What I really love is my scotch. It's the power, the power of positive drinking.

I'll tell ya, I'm a genuinely nice guy. I really am. A real nice guy. But I think I'm temperamental.

To debate political objectives, views, and goals is the most American thing conceivable.