Pete Townshend Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories. — Pete Townshend

Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the late Fifties. — Pete Townshend

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

We won't get fooled again! — Pete Townshend

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

Here comes the new boss Same as the old boss. — Pete Townshend

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. — 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

We have to focus on his early work, and just one or two of his movies, and elements of his TV shows, to keep his memory pure. People now know that Elvis could play a mean rhythm guitar himself, and needed no other musicians to perform a great song. But Elvis was not just a rock star, he was an all-round entertainer. — Pete Townshend

Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury was trying to keep his homosexuality from the front pages, Boy George was openly & outrageously gay. — Pete Townshend

Give blood, but you may find that blood is not enough. — Pete Townshend

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract. — Pete Townshend

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. — Pete Townshend

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

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

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. — Pete Townshend

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

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. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

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

Parade your pallor in iniquity. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

Some kid writes to me and says, 'I've got all your records and I listen to your music all day long and I look at your pictures all the time and I write to you and all I get is a bleeding autographed picture. You don't know how much time I spend thinking about you.' I write back to him and say, 'You don't know how much time I spend thinking about teenagers. — Pete Townshend

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. — 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

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

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. — Pete Townshend

Your love is like heroin. — 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

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

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. — 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

Prayer TV looks like pay TV to me. — 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

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy. — Pete Townshend

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

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

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

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

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

I want to get inside your bitter mind and see what I can find. — Pete Townshend

I heard that Harry Nilsson had died. The secret to being a successful hellraiser, it seemed, was to stop raising hell before hell razed you. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They're less scary when they aren't going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I. — 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

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. — Pete Townshend

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth. — Pete Townshend

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

Like so many addicts, I'd thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around — Pete Townshend

When you're part of a gang, you soon find the parts of you that don't fit. These apparent defects can become assets; they're the things about you that make you interesting & useful. — 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

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday. — 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

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

Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you. — Pete Townshend

Life's a bitch and so am I. — Pete Townshend

Young and old will sit and judge unfeeling, while the empty churches' bells are pealing. And the green hills lay ignored, untended, lonely watchers remain unbefriended. — Pete Townshend

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

What the English like to do is to face reality with a glass of port and a tear and fade off like Basil Rathbone into the sunset. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

I want fast food, pretty naked girls preferably tattooed. — 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

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. — Pete Townshend

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

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

Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind. — Pete Townshend

There's a man upon that ledge, he's only cleaning windows. What a shame for the pain we're missing. Gonna lean back on my wall and pray for him to fall. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

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. — 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

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. — Pete Townshend

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph. — Pete Townshend

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

It's like the mod thing is happening again. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

Tough boys running the streets, come a little closer. Rough toys under the sheets, nobody knows her. — Pete Townshend

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline. — Pete Townshend

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

People try to put us down
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Hope I die before I get old. — 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

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

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

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

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts. — Pete Townshend

Give love, and keep blood between brothers — Pete Townshend

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. — 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

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. — Pete Townshend

I see a boy with his mother's ambition, performing for love, trained in submission. — Pete Townshend

I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

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. — Pete Townshend

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

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