Pete Townshend Quotes

Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

We have to focus on his early work, and just one or two of his movies, and elements of his TV shows, to keep his memory pure. People now know that Elvis could play a mean rhythm guitar himself, and needed no other musicians to perform a great song. But Elvis was not just a rock star, he was an all-round entertainer.

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.

There's no easy way to be free.

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

If I were to have my own brand of guitars, they would have to be industructable.

I want to age with some dignity.

Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.

Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

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.

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.

Let my love open the door To yourheart.

Good old Pete. That's me. But I find it hard to think of myself in the first person when I'm writing about The Who. So many times he has willingly sat down to write about the good old Who. Isn't he too old to masturbate?

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.

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.