Jarvis Cocker Quotes

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.

There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.

Well, once you've resigned yourself to the fact that you are the more mature pop performer and you're past the age you ever thought you would do it, you might as well do it as long as you can. As long as I can still lift a microphone, then I'll do it, you know.

Its OK to grow up, just as long as you don't grow old. Face it you are young.

I used to look at older people who bothered to still attend nightclubs and couldn't help but wonder why. Didn't they realize how foolish they looked? Of course, now that I'm one of those people myself, I have decided that such rules don't apply to me.

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'm always nervous when I perform anyway.

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 would rather kill myself than play my own music ... I can't stand it when people do that.

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.

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.

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.

I like bossy girls. I don't like girls who just do whatever they think you want them to do, and follow you around trying to please you all the time.

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.

I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it.

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.

I love your body 'cause I've lost my mind
If you want someone to talk to, you're wasting your time
If you want someone to share your life, you need someone who's alive
And if every relationship is a two-way street, I have been screwing in the back whilst you drive

I never said I was deep, but I am profoundly shallow
My lack of knowledge is vast, and my horizons are narrow
I never said I was big, I never said that I was clever
And if you're waiting to find what's going on in my mind, you could be waiting forever
Forever and ever

I can dance you to the end of the night 'cause I'm afraid of the dark
I have to confess: I'm out of my depth
You're going over my head and straight through my heart

Some girls like to play it dirty, some girls want to be your mum
Me, I disrespected you whilst we were waiting for the taxi to come
My morality is shabby, my behaviour unacceptable
No, I'm not looking for a relationship, just a willing receptacle

I never said I was...
I never said I was...
I never said I was...
I never said I was deep, but I am profoundly shallow
My lack of knowledge is vast, and my horizons are narrow
Oh, yeah. I never said I was big, I never said that I was clever
And if you're waiting to find what's going on in my mind, you could be waiting forever
Forever and ever

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

For me, the great thing about music is that anybody can do it.

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.

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.

I don't really care what someone's background is; creativity can come from any background.

I'm a sluggish character; I'm a bit slow. For some reason I find it hard to work quickly.

I do want to have that feeling that people are actively involved in something, rather than just consuming something. I suppose that's what it comes down to, because it's such a dominant capitalist society, everything becomes a consumer product. And I don't think that's really appropriate to the creative arts, really.

When I was in Pulp, I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars, and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore.

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Pornography takes all the reality out of sex and Disney does that to family life.

I'm not a religious person but I do like the idea of Sunday as a day set apart from the rest of the week. It's nice to have a period of reflection and have time to think about things.

You don't often hear people say, 'Oh, since he's been taking them drugs, he's such a nice person! He's really come out of his shell, he's really nice, he's blossomed'.

Will you see Pulp again? Who knows. I'm not stoking those particular rumours.

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.

You get to a certain age and you just want to prove that you can still rock - that you've still got it.

If you get involved in music expecting to make a living out of it, then you've picked the wrong thing to do. That shouldn't really be in your mind.

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

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 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.

As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.

For TV you also get those pre-interviews when researchers ask you what you're going to say. The pre-interview drives me insane. If they've already decided the outcome, why don't I just hand in an essay? Maybe if we talk we'll find something out. I'd rather just have an awkward pause.

I know that some filmmakers strive for a kind of naturalistic approach, but you're never going to capture something that's really natural - just the simple fact that you choose to put a frame around something means that you've already chosen one particular thing to put more attention on.

There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.

Silver Machine still sounds really modern with all the white noise. It's a bit punky in a way. They were ahead of their time.

I recently spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield, England, which is where I'm from. I wouldn't move back there, but it's funny when you spend a bit of time in the place where you were brought up. You kind of realize how that place has had quite a big effect on you or made you a certain way.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

I am proud, and more than a little excited, to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.

There seems to be a contradiction in the fact that there's more music around and more channels or downloading music or more channels on TV, and yet at the same time, in some ways it doesn't seem to be as vital as it once was. It seems to be just another entertainment option or lifestyle enhancement aid or something.

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

I always feel like there are specific things about Houston. There's one museum in particular in Houston. So many of the things that I'm interested in now I can sort of trace back to that museum, which introduced me to them.

We live in an age where people are kind of a bit obsessed with celebrity and stuff. You can't help but be curious about it.

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.

I'm sure Sting's a lovely guy. It's just that nobody wants to be seen as that holier-than-thou thing. That over-earnestness is a bit of a problem with people in bands and celebrities or whatever.

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.

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

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.

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.

Everybody's a bit screwed up, you know. You can take it as symptoms of a disorder, or you can take it as personality. Me, I'd rather think it as parts of personality.