Pete Townshend Quotes

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.

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

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.

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

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

Is your perception of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' so shallow that it's violated by dancing raisins?

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

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.

I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything

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

I smash guitars because I like them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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

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 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.

Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

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

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

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.

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

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.

There's no easy way to be free.

Deep inside of every human being is this feeling that nothing is ever going to be complete, that the circle will never connect - and that itself is the secret to infinity.

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

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'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.

Parade your pallor in iniquity.

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

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.

For an electric guitarist to solo effectively on an acoustic guitar you need to develop tricks to avoid the expectation of sustain that comes from playing electrics. Try cascades, for example. Drop arpeggios over open strings, and let the open strings sing as you pick with your fingers. It's kind of a country style of playing, but it works very well in-between heavily strummed parts and fingered lead lines.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.