David Johansen Quotes

Music is my love and to me acting is more mercenary. I don't pound the pavements for roles: if it happens, it happens. I hate that auditioning thing.

I've been around the block a couple of times, and the guy I am now is the guy I like to be.

When I'm sleeping I do a lot of living.

It's really a drag to do the same project over and over again.

I don't know if it's possible to affect my ego any more. There's no room left. For me, I think I make music like the way I think it should be made, like what rock should sound like. It has nothing to do with the current marketplace. And so from that state of mind, it's gonna sound different from anything else out there. And when something sounds different, I think that can be inspiring to other musicians.

I've been tired since I was 15.

Playing music is the best thing in the world. It makes show business almost bearable.

I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and I'm having fun doing it.

Sometimes when I hear my voice on tape, I'm like, 'Who is that horrible man?

The world today is the same as it always was but people know more about what's going on in the world than they used to.

I don't know why I'm alive but I know there's a reason for it.

Most bands are commercial enterprises. But I'm not in one of those bands.

A lot of stuff I do, 10 years later it becomes popular.

I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.

When I was a kid, I had some Charles Lloyd records.

Until I was six years old we lived in the projects, then my two brothers and three sisters and I moved to a three-bed that my mother's father built.

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian.

I still do a lot of shows with Brian Koonin, but we haven't had a full band lately.

The first Latin music that blew my mind was bumba, which was a Puerto Rican beat.

Young people are still looking and older people have found.

I don't really like to sit around the house listening to my own records. They're not that good.

As I recall, my life as a child was so all-consuming that I barely had time to consider the future.

Everything I've done I've just fallen into.

When you're a kid, you have this feeling like you're indestructible. Your mortality doesn't even occur to you. But as time goes by, you realize, "I better cut this out or that out if I want to continue to exist."

Rock & Rollers don't dress for the weather.

I mean, if you asked me what I’m going to be doing when I’m 85, I’d make a quick picture in my mind and, well, I’ll be singing.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

I got arrested once on stage in Memphis for looking too much like Liza Minnelli.

I'm not impersonating anybody. I'm perfectly satisfied with what I am.