Pete Townshend Quotes

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

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“I heard in my own voice the tulmult of a young man playig a role, uneasily, repackaging black R&B music from America, relying on gimmicky outfits, and pretending to be wild & free when in reality he needed to be looked after by his mother.”

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

“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.'”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

“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.”

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

“Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“In 1945 music had a serious purpose; to defy post war depression & revitalize the romantic & hopeful aspirations of an exhausted ppl.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

“There's no easy way to be free.”

— Pete Townshend

“Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.”

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.

— Pete Townshend

“Parade your pallor in iniquity.”

— Pete Townshend

“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?”

— Pete Townshend

“Any fool can hide, few can play.”

— Pete Townshend

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.

— Pete Townshend

“I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.”

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend

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

— Pete Townshend