Pete Townshend Quotations

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

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.

When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.

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.

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.

The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter.

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.

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

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.

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

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.

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.

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

My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.

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.

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.

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

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.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

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

He is the king. If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar.

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 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.

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 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.

My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

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.

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.

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.

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

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

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

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 felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today.

To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world.

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

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.

What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.

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.

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.

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

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.

left entirely to me the decision as to whether or not to go on with the tour.

My autobiography now offers me the chance to lay down my life story and place recent events in proper context, ... I have had a long and lumbering life -- this book will take time.

Peter Doherty is the ultimate rock 'n' roll nihilist, the ultimate rock 'n' roll f***wit.

I have high hopes for the whole tour to be shared to a wide audience at home in a mixture of pay-per-view and free special Web casts. Some of the proceeds will go to charity, of course.

I don't know where I'm going I don't know what I need But I'll get to where I'm going to end up And that's all right by me

John Entwistle told me shortly before he died that he would find it hard to offer songs for the Who to record because he could no longer allow Roger (or me) to comment on them in any way at all.

Roger and I (will) meet in mid-December to play what we have written, ... If we move ahead from there, we may have a CD ready to release in the spring. If the recording works out, we will tour with the usual band in the first half of 2005.

I think I may have been sexually abused as a child and I was doing research into it

We are going on. First show Hollywood Bowl. Pray for us John, wherever you are.

Why should I care? Why should I care? ... 5:15

I simply believe we have a duty to go on, to ourselves, ticket buyers, staff, promoters, big and little people. I also have a duty to myself and my dependent family and friends. I also want to help guide Roger and the rest of the band at this time, all of whom have been shaken by John's death.

I refuse to have my best efforts - already heavily filtered in advance and subjected to the constraints of finance and time - rejected by any criteria whatsoever.

I have said many times... that I am reticent about committing to a tour without a completed new Who album under my belt. As things stand I am still pushing to produce some more songs. So the announcement (of a 2006 tour) may seem premature. It is not.

If I keep at it, with luck we should see a great new Who record before I drop dead. What helps is that I love Roger and he loves me and we are both willing to work and wait.

I am old, right? And, you know, I'm glad I didn't die. That's the sort of thing you say when you're a young geezer, and what do you know when you're young?

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

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

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

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.

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.

We won't get fooled again!

We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.

I'll spend my mornings at the sunshine café.

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

Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday / And I get on my knees and pray.

Link is a quiet man to meet- easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside he gets very very mean very often. I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard Rumble , and yet very excited by the guitar sound. And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson. We met him in New York in 1970 while recording Who's Next.... this later inspired the b-side Wasp Man, a tune we dedicated to Link Wray.

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

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.

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

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Any fool can hide, few can play.

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

It's sad when people break up.

No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned

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.

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

Give love, and keep blood between brothers

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

Here comes the new boss Same as the old boss.

I want fast food, pretty naked girls preferably tattooed.