Iggy Pop Quotes

“I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.”

— Iggy Pop

“I like music that's more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.”

— Iggy Pop

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

— Iggy Pop

“I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.”

— Iggy Pop

I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don't believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet.

— Iggy Pop

I'm deeper than the shit I'm in and I don't really give a damn.

— Iggy Pop

“Something I like to do a lot is just sit by water when there's a current and just stare into the water. I don't fish, I don't hunt, I don't scuba, I don't spear, don't boat, don't play basketball or football - I excel at staring into space. I'm really good at that.”

— Iggy Pop

“'Punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.”

— Iggy Pop

“Miami is nothing like me, and that's why I need to be here - it's the opposite. I'm practical, where this place is moody, I'm stolid in my interior, where this place has a certain flair, and I'm materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual - there's a quicksilver quality about this place.”

— Iggy Pop

“Second only to the sea, the Miami sky has been the greatest comfort in my life past 50. On a good day, when the wind blows from the south, the light here is diffuse and forgiving.”

— Iggy Pop

“It's more fun to look at an old picture of me than it is to look at a new one sometimes. Although, I still wear a dress pretty well.”

— Iggy Pop

“Nobody understands me, I'm really sensitive.”

— Iggy Pop

“I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.”

— Iggy Pop

“She looked at me penetratingly. So I suppose you can figure out what happened next.”

— Iggy Pop

“In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.”

— Iggy Pop

“My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.”

— Iggy Pop

“The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren't going for the music.”

— Iggy Pop

“A lot of young musicians get the money at the wrong time. They get it for something they don't feel great about, and it'll make you feel so bad it'll destroy you and kill you.”

— Iggy Pop

“Musical types tend to combine the burden of the author with the burden of the actor.”

— Iggy Pop

I have no idea why a guy would bring a jar of peanut butter to a concert.

— Iggy Pop

“It's fair to say that I have a side that is prudent and a side that is not.”

— Iggy Pop

“What some people would call antics, I would just call a good show.”

— Iggy Pop

Music is life, and life is not a business.

— Iggy Pop

“I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.”

— Iggy Pop

“Bowie's a real man, and I'm a real woman - just like Catherine Deneuve.”

— Iggy Pop

“Cigarettes and coffee, man, that's a combination.”

— Iggy Pop

“It is very important what not to do.”

— Iggy Pop

“I'm not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don't get "Iggy Sings." I am also a style of music, an approach.”

— Iggy Pop

“I'll love you when my eyes are open, I'll love you when my eyes are gone.”

— Iggy Pop

Onstage I've been hit by a grapefruit, beercans, eggs, spit, money, cigarette butts, Mandies, Quaaludes, joints, bras, panties, and a fist.

— Iggy Pop

“I always went in with a very specific idea of the sound I wanted, and once I'd recorded I'd try and make it sell as much as I could, but I only went in thinking of a sound I wanted. So, it's no surprise to me that he got the hit and I didn't. But what I realized was that he did dress it up nicely, and my god, he does sing on key well.”

— Iggy Pop

Life is just a bag of pot.

— Iggy Pop

“In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.”

— Iggy Pop

“I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there are others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.”

— Iggy Pop

“I thought, "Wow, it sounds really stoned anyway." It sounded good to me. I found out that there was a lot in there. what all this comes down to is I was just trying to get in touch with myself. And I met some interesting people in New York who weren't in show business. I even got to know my dentist.”

— Iggy Pop

“I'm not the kind of person who could join AA or have rules for myself or on Thursday take this vitamin pill. So, basically, I learned the hard way. I learned by trial and error, and tried to get drugs out of my work. That took about a year. If I was going to work, it was best that I be straight. And I was surprised at what came out.”

— Iggy Pop

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter.

— Iggy Pop

“I thought that if I practiced doing melodies for a year or so at home, I would learn to think melodically, and when I went to work it would come out, and it did, on this album. What else was important to me ... ? I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.”

— Iggy Pop

“I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.”

— Iggy Pop

“Well, it wasn't like I was going to run out and score heroin and score an ounce of coke - but incidentally, on the road, I would usually get tanked up and as stoned as I possibly could to go on stage. And offstage, it would be a demon that would come up about twice a week.”

— Iggy Pop

“It's the same thing: I would think, "If I can't go out and pull some teenager tonight, maybe I'm no good on stage anymore." And you start to think that you even need it as a motivation. I did, anyway.”

— Iggy Pop

“I never had a checkbook. It used to be cash in hand, stuff in the pocket, or a manager would keep some accounts and give me money. I started to wonder what it must feel like to actually make a profit, pay taxes, and to have a phone listing, and a manager. And also, I was sick of sleeping around every night.”

— Iggy Pop

“I spent most of the eighties, most of my life, riding around in somebody else's car, in possession of, or ingested of, something illegal, on my way from something illegal to something illegal with many illegal things happening all around me”

— Iggy Pop

“The key to The Doors is the culture behind the myth.”

— Iggy Pop

“I am the passenger, I stay under glass. I look through my window so bright, I see the stars come out tonight. I see the bright and hollow sky, over the city's ripped backsides and everything looks good tonight.”

— Iggy Pop

“You know, I'm fifty-two now and I call myself a singer. Before I kick it I want to be able to carry a tune in a living room if called upon. Of course, mine come out all dark and twisted and weird.”

— Iggy Pop

Your skin starts itching once you buy that gimmick about something called love.

— Iggy Pop

“When I get up in the morning, I stay nude for three or four hours. If I really feel like getting formal, I'll put on board shorts.”

— Iggy Pop

“Nihilism is best done by professionals.”

— Iggy Pop

“I never say never about anything.”

— Iggy Pop