Pete Townshend Quotes

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.

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.

Rock music is important to people , because it allows them to escape this crazy world. It allows them not to run away from the problems that are there, but to face up to them , but at the same time sort of DANCE ALL OVER THEM. That's what rock and roll is about.

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

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

I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.

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.

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.

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

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

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

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free.

Some kid writes in to me and says, 'I've got all your records and I listen to your music all day long and I look at your pictures all the time and I write to you and all I get is a bleedin' autographed picture. You don't know how much time I spend thinkin' about you lot.' I write him back and say, 'You don't know how much time I spend looking at and thinking about teenagers.

I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique.

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

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.

Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.

People try to put us down
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Hope I die before I get old.

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.

English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play.

There's no easy way to be free.

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

We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.

Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you.

I don't need to fight / To prove I'm right / I don't need to be forgiven

I saw the Internet as being something which would allow power mongers to control us, and that we would willingly go to that if it promised us salvation - if it promised to show us who we were and let us find ourselves as we had, uniquely in our generation, through rock music.

I've learned a huge amount because I've been tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted.

Life's a bitch and so am I.

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

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

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

It's terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.

When people keep repeating
That you'll never fall in love
When everybody keeps retreating
But you can't seem to get enough
Let my love open the door
Let my love open the door
Let my love open the door
To your heart.

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.

In a sense, the god we trust politically is a slightly different god than the one we bring into the fray when we enter a rock concert. One of the things I can say with absolute conviction is that I worship that god.

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

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

Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.

The day you open your mind to music, you're halfway to opening your mind to life.

I smash guitars because I like them.

The Who is now a brand, not a band; but it is a brand that is upheld by its audience, not an industry or a cynical moneymaking machine.

Any fool can hide, few can play.

Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions.

I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.

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

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch my father's clarinets or saxophones, just my harmonica.

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

Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury was trying to keep his homosexuality from the front pages, Boy George was openly & outrageously gay.

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief.

Judging by the faces of those around me, just the fact of Roger speaking to me meant that my life could very well change.

For the first time, a whole generation had the economic & educational opportunity to turn their backs on the dead end factory jobs of their parents, who, traumatized by two world wars, had responded by creating a safety blanket of conformity.

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

I think we are incumbent, I am incumbent, the Who is incumbent, anybody that produces anything by me is incumbent by my Englishness.

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 was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They're less scary when they aren't going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I.

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.

I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

I'M FREE! - I'm free,
And freedom tastes of reality,
I'm free - I'm free,
An' I'm waiting for you to follow me.

His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath.

Even as age humbles me it feeds my arrogance.
There is still nothing that interests me as much as myself.

I needed to give back, give back, give back. I felt guilty about my success. I felt uncomfortable about how easily I had been delivered this extraordinary life that I had.

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.

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.

Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.

I heard that Harry Nilsson had died. The secret to being a successful hellraiser, it seemed, was to stop raising hell before hell razed you.

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

I played the guitar for ten years before I realized it wasn't a weapon.

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.

If you don't want anyone to know anything about you, don't write anything.

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.

What we learned quite early on is what was really important to early British pop that we produced-and this is where we were distinct from almost everybody else in this respect-is that it had to reflect exactly what the audience wanted us to say.

Respect yourself. Try to remember that not everything in life can be perfect. You will make mistakes. That's inevitable. But you are not ugly. You will only be ugly when you behave in an ugly way.

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties.

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.

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around

Announcer - "And where are you from Pete?"
Pete Townshend - "London, I'm from London."
Announcer - "London where, exactly?"
Pete - "London, England

Beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

So remember when you're looking for trouble
That trouble is already busy with weaker men

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts.

I respect those who follow religious routes only if they seem to me to be morally proper and in accord with the modern world.

Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.

Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they don't have, beauty they haven't worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.

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

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.