Pete Townshend Quotes

The fact of the matter is, I'm f**king brilliant. Not 'was' brilliant. 'Am' brilliant.

Any fool can hide, few can play.

Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind.

Water is more precious than oil. Both are more precious than music. Music won't heat a house or help a plant to grow.

I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.

I want fast food, pretty naked girls preferably tattooed.

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

I am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.

Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired.

The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

It's an ordinary day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.

Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you.

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood.

Once she woke with untamed lover's face between her legs, now he's cooled and stifled and it's she who has to beg.

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

Dance is the only thing that lets you lose yourself and find yourself at the same time.

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.'

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.

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

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.

I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine.

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.

I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

Don't cry Don't raise your eye Its only teenage wasteland.

It's sad when people break up.

Tough boys running the streets, come a little closer. Rough toys under the sheets, nobody knows her.

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.

But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can.

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.

If it screams truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong, but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock n' roll.

There's a man upon that ledge, he's only cleaning windows. What a shame for the pain we're missing. Gonna lean back on my wall and pray for him to fall.

Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.

It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along.

Give love, and keep blood between brothers

What the Who is all about is exactly that and it always has been. If it exists today for this concert, it's in response again to a function which is happening out there on the street.

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.

I see a boy with his mother's ambition, performing for love, trained in submission.

For an electric guitarist to solo effectively on an acoustic guitar you need to develop tricks to avoid the expectation of sustain that comes from playing electrics. Try cascades, for example. Drop arpeggios over open strings, and let the open strings sing as you pick with your fingers. It's kind of a country style of playing, but it works very well in-between heavily strummed parts and fingered lead lines.

Looking back, I don't know why we needed it to be quite so loud all the time.

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

In the midnight of a soul's unsleeping, hear the waterfall of women weeping. Hear the distant noise of traffic stalling, hear the prostituted children calling.

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.