Iggy Pop Quotes

Cigarettes and coffee, man, that's a combination.

You know what I think you get scared of more - especially me, after touring for so long and being in bands for so long - you start to associate certain behavior with the music. It's like people associate having a cigarette with having a cup of coffee, or lunch.

It's fair to say that I have a side that is prudent and a side that is not.

She looked at me penetratingly. So I suppose you can figure out what happened next.

I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I'd recorded I'd try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted. So, it's no surprise to me that he got the hit and I didn't. But what I realized was that he did dress it up nicely, and my god, he does sing on key well.

They say that death kills you, But death doesn't kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.

Second only to the sea, the Miami sky has been the greatest comfort in my life past 50. On a good day, when the wind blows from the south, the light here is diffuse and forgiving.

My mom was a saint. She taught me to be terminally nice.

I'm not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don't get "Iggy Sings." I am also a style of music, an approach.

I'm deeper than the shit I'm in and I don't really give a damn.

I'd have a few on and off, but the commitment was always more on the girls' part than on mine, to be perfectly honest. So, I met a girl in Tokyo, on my Japanese tour, with whom I've been living ever since, very happily. Her name is Suchi.

The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame was a great idea when it started, but I think they ought to close it, I think it's full.

What do you do with a lifetime of work? Face it in the morning.

I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there are others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.

It's more fun to look at an old picture of me than it is to look at a new one sometimes. Although, I still wear a dress pretty well.

The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, 'We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.'

It is very important what not to do.

Onstage I've been hit by a grapefruit, beercans, eggs, spit, money, cigarette butts, Mandies, Quaaludes, joints, bras, panties, and a fist.

I'll love you when my eyes are open, I'll love you when my eyes are gone.

There are no pimps, no whores, no transvestites - gone. Now that's more the culture I'm comfortable in ... I don't like it in the house, you know what I mean, but I like it somewhere around.

I don't think I'm lucky; I think I have a tough constitution. That's a lot of it. And I've been wise enough to listen to other people. I was unconsciously cultivating as many straight friends as I could.

I'm not the kind of person who could join AA or have rules for myself or on Thursday take this vitamin pill. So, basically, I learned the hard way. I learned by trial and error, and tried to get drugs out of my work. That took about a year. If I was going to work, it was best that I be straight. And I was surprised at what came out.

Well, after Zombie Birdhouse came out, I toured behind it in the fall of 1982, into the spring, and in the summer in the Far East. At that time, I found my work self-referential; it was getting to be rock songs about a rock singer who lived a rock life on the rock road, and I was starting to wonder what I would be like to rent my own apartment, what it would be like to have a checkbook.

How am I going to listen to that horrible noise I make without a gram of coke and a couple of double Jack Daniels?

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

I thought that if I practiced doing melodies for a year or so at home, I would learn to think melodically, and when I went to work it would come out, and it did, on this album. What else was important to me ... ? I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.

I'm a little bit damaged in about 15 different ways, and it's been nice that no particular damaged area has become a major issue. I'm a more than moderately healthy 65-year-old male who has gotten away with a lot of stuff.

Life is just a bag of pot.

Curious is a good thing to be, it seems to pay some unexpected dividends.

I never say never about anything.

And if somebody's going to produce me, they should be producing my sound for me. And that's something I have to come up with myself.

When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.

I spent most of the eighties, most of my life, riding around in somebody else's car, in possession of, or ingested of, something illegal, on my way from something illegal to something illegal with many illegal things happening all around me

I'd come home from school alone with those teenage blues and I'd put on Frank Sinatra's It was a very good year. Here was this mature man singing about the cycle of his life, and as a kid I felt the emotions of it already. It has since been a touchstone for me whenever I want to experiment musically.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

A lot of young musicians get the money at the wrong time. They get it for something they don't feel great about, and it'll make you feel so bad it'll destroy you and kill you.

The nut of the thing is that if what you make is hard like a diamond, you can put it anywhere. You can put it up your and it will still be beautiful.

Miami's never been more than a spit from New York.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that's such a rare gift. It's underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.

Your skin starts itching once you buy that gimmick about something called love.

I try to beat back the producers and engineers so they - there's not an excess of stuff used to squeeze my voice to make it artificial. There's a person in there, and people will listen; if they hear another person speak to them, they'll listen because it's lonely out here.

The future of rock n roll is Justin Bieber.

I wanted to learn a little bit about acting, not because I thought I'd find a star vehicle and set the world on fire, but I thought the discipline of it would be good for me. I met a good coach, and I joined her class - with a lot of hungry young actors who really didn't acre if I was a rock 'n' roll singer or not. I started to learn to get a focus, without having to jump up and down every few seconds.

You know, I'm fifty-two now and I call myself a singer. Before I kick it I want to be able to carry a tune in a living room if called upon. Of course, mine come out all dark and twisted and weird.

'Punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.

The 2 things I like the most are girls and loud noises.

I'm glad I am crazy, it keeps me trying. I despise trendies, I know they're lying.

DMT was a gaseous wax that you could smoke that gave you a 20-minute psychedelic high. You'd inhale it. And then when you'd exhale - poof, you'd be high. I saw Buddha, man. I know that sounds like no big deal. But I saw a gigantic holographic Buddha - correct in every way! Buddhas can be very intricate - these drawings that you see in books. Thousands of details were included in this Buddha. Where did they come from? I didn't make them up. I can't even draw, you know? I could barely spell cat, you know? And there it was. And I thought, Wow - the power of the mind, you know?

Well, I don't use the toilet much to pee in. I almost always pee in the yard or the garden, because I like to pee on my estate.

I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.

I thought, "Wow, it sounds really stoned anyway." It sounded good to me. I found out that there was a lot in there. what all this comes down to is I was just trying to get in touch with myself. And I met some interesting people in New York who weren't in show business. I even got to know my dentist.

I am the passenger, I stay under glass. I look through my window so bright, I see the stars come out tonight. I see the bright and hollow sky, over the city's ripped backsides and everything looks good tonight.

I'm bored, I'm the chairman of the board.

And it's a ... it's a term 'Punk Rock' that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion , style , elitism, satanism , and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.

Living in England was wonderfully civil and easy-going.

I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.

What the world needs right now ... a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare

I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they've been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

I'm a travel enthusiast.

Nobody understands me, I'm really sensitive.

Basically, I'm a musical vocalist, but I do voiceover stuff as a sideline, like plumbing or something.

When it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge unimportant detail.

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.

I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simply blues.

I became Iggy because I had a sadistic boss at a record store. I'd been in a band called the Iguanas. And when this boss wanted to embarrass and demean me, he'd say, 'Iggy, get me a coffee, light.'

I never had a checkbook. It used to be cash in hand, stuff in the pocket, or a manager would keep some accounts and give me money. I started to wonder what it must feel like to actually make a profit, pay taxes, and to have a phone listing, and a manager. And also, I was sick of sleeping around every night.

Something I like to do a lot is just sit by water when there's a current and just stare into the water. I don't fish, I don't hunt, I don't scuba, I don't spear, don't boat, don't play basketball or football - I excel at staring into space. I'm really good at that.

If I don't terrorize, I'm not Pop.

When I get up in the morning, I stay nude for three or four hours. If I really feel like getting formal, I'll put on board shorts.

Music is life, and life is not a business.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

As society has changed, what had formerly been unacceptable has become colourful.

I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.