Weller Quotes & Sayings

I don't like the royal family, I don't like the establishment, I don't like the civil service. — Paul Weller

Look. I was a superhero in the '90s. I said so at the time. McCartney, Weller, Townshend, Richards, my first album's better than all their first albums. Even they'd admit that. — Noel Gallagher

For me, there's always an early-'70s sense. There's always a sprinkle of it - if I do it exactly like that, sometimes it becomes too costume-y or too thought out. But the influences are there, without a doubt, always, because to me, that was the part that I also felt was the most defining of my own personality and my own style, and I also think that it's timeless. You never look wrong. — Paul Weller

You are wery obligin', sir,' replied Sam. 'Now, don't allow yourself to be fatigued beyond your powers; there's a amiable bein'. Consider what you owe to society, and don't let yourself be injured by too much work. For the sake o' your feller-creeturs, keep yourself as quiet as you can; only think what a loss you would be!' With these pathetic words, Sam Weller departed. — Charles Dickens

The whole nostalgia thing, and just sticking with what you always liked and what you know and not taking a chance on something or expanding. I think especially after a certain age. — Paul Weller

I don't think about what I can't do or what I shouldn't be doing. I just think there are endless possibilities musically, really. — Paul Weller

I'm American. Like I told you. And I'm American and not something else because they failed that day. They couldn't do it and most of them probably knew they couldn't do it before they even started, but they went anyhow. There's honor in that. I don't reckon there's much honor left in the world now, but they had it that day and I honor them on both sides by knowing what I can about it. Much as I can. — Lance Weller

When I told my mum I was going to play my first gig when I was 14, she couldn't believe it, cause I was painfully shy at that time. But I just done it, put my head down and got through it. And I suppose there's still a little bit of that, even though it's many years later and I've been doing it for a long time. — Paul Weller

I always feel that art springs more from dirt than from fine intentions: given the choice, I put my trust in dirt. — Anthony Weller

Young people can listen to music at any moment in the day or night. Which is great, but I think it kind of devalues it as well. They don't feel the need to own it. They certainly don't feel the need to pay for it. I'd have to save up for weeks to buy an album when I was a kid, and that made it even more great for me when I finally got that thing in my hand. — Paul Weller

People say you make your best work when you're in despair and all that, and at your lowest - but for me, I think happiness makes you positive, and I think that's a good creative place to write from. — Paul Weller

The goals are not about the sweet smell of success as much as it's about enjoying a damn day on the movie set ... I live in a complete state of grace. — Peter Weller

I'd like to think I've left something in the world. Without in any way trying to be morbid, but life is very short, and I'd like to think I'd leave some body of work that would inspire other musicians long after I've gone. — Paul Weller

I don't really wanna talk about politics, I'm not clever enough. — Paul Weller

No man should have cowboys boots in his wardrobe. That's fair enough, isn't it? Unless you're a cowboy, of course. — Paul Weller

When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I'd write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I'd sit there writing songs with my guitar. — Paul Weller

Everyone gets frustrated and aggressive, and I'd sooner take my aggression out on a guitar than on a person. — Paul Weller

I'm so lucky, I'm just really grateful for what I've got around me - children and my wife and everything else. — Paul Weller

I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago. — Paul Weller

Playing live is what it's all about for me. It's cathartic, it's emotional, it's about communing with people. The way you feel after a gig is a such a powerful thing. — Paul Weller

All my children inspire me in life, and that always comes out in the writing. — Paul Weller

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself. — Francis Ward Weller

We need military border patrols to battle drugs & terrorism. — Jerry Weller

I'm fine with being thought of as a guitar player, and if I can get any recognition or respect for doing that, that's a pretty good thing for me. — Paul Weller

I think you have to satisfy yourself first and foremost. — Paul Weller

Going to college was never an option. I was passionate about music, but how much talent I actually had was another matter. — Paul Weller

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty. — Jerry Weller

I steer away from episodic TV; it burns you out. — Peter Weller

Music is the most natural thing in the world. When we go to a gig and we all like it and we share that experience, it's the same sense of communion as a sacred rite in Borneo or wherever it may be; it just gets dressed up different. Its good for the soul. — Paul Weller

I love you, Nathan Douglas Weller. — Julie Ann Walker

It is nice to make a record and people like it, and it's encouraging. — Paul Weller

Today the House has a chance to give 25 million married couples the best Valentine's Day gift possible, elimination from the most unfair of taxes, the marriage tax penalty. — Jerry Weller

Sometimes you're ahead of the game and sometimes people don't get it and that's just one of those things you have to accept and carry on. — Paul Weller

My career was always full of risks one way or another, and that's the way I like it. — Peter Weller

The Jam were a good band, however I feel that the Style Council were better. A lot of people I know will disagree with me. Some things we did with The Style Council were misinterpreted or over their heads. — Paul Weller

I think the world is really small today, and fashion, from that end of it, it's instantaneous everywhere. — Paul Weller

I could say that 'Exile On Main Street' was my favourite or whatever, but I'm more about the songs and the artists and the sound that they bring. — Paul Weller

The tax code can be used to eliminate the toll booths on the information superhighway. — Jerry Weller

I think the biggest influence for me is when I hear a great piece of music, whatever the style, I'm kind of inspired by that greatness and I'm inspired to try and obtain something that comes close to that greatness. — Paul Weller

"There is no deception now, Mr. Weller. Tears," said Job, with a look of momentary slyness, "tears are not the only proofs of distress, nor the best ones." — Charles Dickens

Of course I'm proud of what I've done, but I'm interested in what's next. I want to be relevant now, in 2012. I've done my bit for the past. I've only ever been about what's next, really, and I'll be that way until I keel over. — Paul Weller

The rail service is important for my district. — Jerry Weller

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away? — Sam Weller

I'm sure there's a subconscious 'go for it' thing with turning 50. You want to do as much as possible and there are thoughts of how little time we have on the planet. For a lot of musicians in their 50s, the best days are behind them. I'd like to try and show that there is a future. — Paul Weller

It's just something internal that says, 'I've got to do this now. This is what I'm doing now.' — Paul Weller

Even somebody like The Black Keys or Royal Blood, they all have this original roots base to what they do. — Paul Weller

Why not go down the pub? A guy once came up to me at a gig and asked me if I had MySpace. I said, 'This is my space, and you're invading it.' — Paul Weller

When I go to the movies, I like romance, comedy, and thrillers. I hate gore. — Peter Weller

I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history. — Peter Weller

Everything I did was pure love. Pure love. And if you live that way, you've had a great life. - 'Ray Bradbury: the last interview and other conversations' by Sam Weller (p.92) — Ray Bradbury

I'm still a mod, I'll always be a mod, you can bury me a mod. — Paul Weller

There are areas of music that I've never been to before, so that's always nice thing to have in life. That there are other areas you haven't been to. You haven't covered all the ground, and there's plenty more uncharted territory to cover as well. — Paul Weller

I only put an album out every two or three years. — Paul Weller

If you gave me a fresh carnation, I would only crush its tender petals ... — Paul Weller

I want to hear as much music as I possibly can before I leave this mortal coil but it's impossible to hear it all because there's so much of it. — Paul Weller

Television is an isolating experience, sadly enough. I'm sorry to say it. But as good as it ever gets, it's still isolating. You sit in your home and visit with no one. — Peter Weller

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan. — Sam Weller

I wear jeans and a T-shirt sometimes. I just like clothes - since the first time I can remember, like age ten or eleven; I was just obsessed with music and clothes. Just like a lot of people in England from my generation. — Paul Weller

Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with. — Paul Weller

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people. — Paul Weller

My thought for today: Writing a letter to a friend today has helped clear a lot in my mind. It has taught me not to go on the defensive, instead to poke two fingers up to my critics who have no idea what restrictions there are when it comes to writing about a cold case". — Monica Weller

"O' course I came to look arter you, my darlin'," replied Mr. Weller; for once permitting his passion to get the better of his veracity. — Charles Dickens

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today. — Paul Weller

You can listen to music at any moment in the day or night. Which is great, but I think it kind of devalues it as well. — Paul Weller

When I listen to a record, or when I'm making a record, I listen to everything. I listen to the drums, the bass, the voice, the arrangement. I listen to the whole piece as an ensemble. — Paul Weller

I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature. — Sam Weller

The whole thing with eastern music and instruments, I love all that stuff. — Paul Weller

It's a global fashion thing; because of the Internet it has gotten really small. It's cluttered, but it's gotten small. — Paul Weller

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons. — Jerry Weller

I wanted to make a record that sounded like a continous piece — Paul Weller

Make it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime. — Jerry Weller

Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It's a Rat Pack-era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. — Sam Weller

"Vell," said Mr. Weller, "Now I s'pose he'll want to call some witnesses to speak to his character, or p'raps to prove a alleybi. I've been a turnin' the bis'ness over in my mind, and he may make his-self easy, Sammy. I've got some friends as'll do either for him, but my adwice 'ud be this here-never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi. Nothing like a alleybi, Sammy, nothing." — Charles Dickens

It's important to know all those things, but part of our jobs is to move people along and to make people excited to buy music or buy clothes, and give them enjoyment, I think, too. — Paul Weller

I think politicians are so far out of step with what people really want. — Paul Weller

In my world [of fashion] there's more things that kind of affect it. There's the retailers we do business with, our own stores, my merchandising team ... Everybody has opinions, and so you definitely have to filter through a lot. — Paul Weller

I'm always looking for something. Not in an unhappy way. I just like to try different things. I don't want to be morbid, but I'm not getting any younger. — Paul Weller

I had a total belief in The Style Council. I meant every word and felt every action. — Paul Weller

In the darkness all you have are your memories. — Keith M. Weller

You can't live a lie. You have to follow your heart. — Paul Weller

There was a time in my 40s where I thought, oh, it's all over - not just work, but I'm never going to feel young again, I'm always going to feel like I know what's going to happen, I'll know what to expect. Looking back I don't know if that was a midlife crisis, I don't know - but I don't feel that now. There's possibilities. It gets better. — Paul Weller

Andrew Carnegie loved libraries; he knew their importance to an educated society and as anchors to our communities. And so, just as some loyal baseball fans travel to attend games at all 30 major league stadiums, over the last decade or so, I have slowly, casually, visited Carnegie libraries whenever I am on the road. — Sam Weller

If you're making music, you must want to turn other people on to it, whether you're number one in the charts or number 60. I don't know, that's a commercial thing, but just the fact that other people like you ... there's no point in making music, otherwise. Otherwise, you might as well make it in your bedroom and leave it there. — Paul Weller

I was such a massive fan of all the '60s pop bands, but if I had to single out one band, it would definitely be The Beatles. — Paul Weller

I take my hat off to people like the Stones, but it's not for me. I couldn't do that. Jagger is brilliant and long may he rock. I couldn't make my career out of old songs; it would do my head in. — Paul Weller

I get bored quickly. I kind of take my hat off to bands who have been around for a long time and still do the same thing, because it's hard to keep a band together for decades. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't play the same songs night after night or just trade on my past glories, because it wouldn't interest me as a person. — Paul Weller

I never saw myself as a spokesman for a generation. It was all a bit heavy for me. I saw myself as a songwriter and wrote for myself, which I still do, and I also wanted to communicate with my audience. — Paul Weller

Today, we're even into the whole sweat thing. They'll wear a [suit] jacket like this, but they'll wear it with sweat pants and sneakers. But I do think there is every generation - and it won't be as big as it was when you and I were those ages - but every generation all of a sudden experiences that they want to dress up. — Paul Weller

There have been records I've been really, really pleased with that haven't connected with people. But I felt good about them. — Paul Weller

I suppose I was much more serious-minded in the '70s and '80s. — Paul Weller

I suppose it's nice to have some surprise in life and to surprise yourself in life and see what else you can do. — Paul Weller

When you look at so much of what we all love, there's either soul-based to it, or it's the blues. It's really the beginnings of any kind of music. It really is; it all starts there. Because after that, it's music of the moment. — Paul Weller

Getting to No. 1 makes everyone feel better; of course it does. But it's swings and roundabouts with these things. Sometimes you make a great record, and it clicks with people. And other times it passes them by; there's nothing you can do. It's still the same record. — Paul Weller

I'm definitely obsessed about artists and the type of music and the playing and the tone and all that kind of thing - I'm not obsessed about what the best Beatles album is. I just think if The Beatles are great, they're great. — Paul Weller

There's this British elegance that we, at times, have really missed in the States. We've always been more of a sportswear culture. — Paul Weller

I am aware of the words 'national treasure' being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old. — Paul Weller

Ban partial-birth abortion except to save mother's life. — Jerry Weller

I don't like to get pigeonholed. I don't like it when people think they have you sewn up. — Paul Weller

I've not had Botox, no. — Paul Weller