Jarvis Cocker Quotes - Page 2

There are some quite funny things about getting famous and stuff, but I think there comes a point where you have to think to yourself, "Well, am I doing this because I want to go to a party and meet Britney Spears? Or am I doing it because I want to create something that excites me?"

Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.

Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance. It's always been about trying to get to know people. Albeit, it's a bit of a contradiction because you can't really get to know people when they're 10 feet away and there's a big mass of them.

Everybody's a bit screwed up, you know. You can take it as symptoms of a disorder, or you can take it as personality. Me, I'd rather think it as parts of personality.

Noise is an easy thing to hide behind. If you make a lot of noise and shout behind that, nobody can tell what you're singing.

I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It's like we've found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can't do that. It's an overabundance of information.

Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening; the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.

I used to look at older people who bothered to still attend nightclubs and couldn't help but wonder why. Didn't they realise how foolish they looked? Of course, now that I'm one of those people myself, I have decided that such rules don't apply to me.

I always thought that I might retire from any form of sexuality by the age of 40 and just become a dignified older person.

I travel backwards and forwards quite a lot. I live very near to the train station. I'm kind of playing at being an expatriate, I suppose.

I'd never really wanted to have a really 'private' life before. But when somebody starts delving into it and printing details through the tabloids for shagging people you shouldn't have shagged, then that probably made me shy away a bit more from giving too much away.

I think basically becoming famous has taken the place of going to Heaven in modern society, hasn't it? That's the place where your dreams will come true. It's an act of faith now; they think that's going to sort things out.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isnt it?

I would rather kill myself than play my own music... I can't stand it when people do that.

If you perform on a stage or you sing a song, it's like you sing your song, and then the words go into the air, and then they go into somebody's body through their ears, so it's kind of like penetrating somebody. It's kind of like having sex with somebody - but, obviously, from a great distance.

It’s interesting that most gadgets are called ‘iPhone’ and ‘iPod,’ with that ‘i’ prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led – a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you’re not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You’ve got to let the subconscious in – that’s my main message to the world.

I was kind of reared by television, but the BBC, it still had that thing - and people are always invoking that kind of Reithian idea - where you could learn stuff from it. If you put a kid in front of a telly now to be reared by that you'd just have a jibbering idiot, you know what I mean? Just adverts for a start. It's almost like the programmes are an afterthought, the real business of this channel is to sell you things and we're just going to space out those announcements with some crap to watch.

The working class has been turned into a consuming class - a situation has been created where people value their worth by what they can afford.

I believe that humans adapt to circumstance. The Internet is quite an unprecedented circumstance, so it's going to take people a while to get their heads around it.

I recently spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield, England, which is where I'm from. I wouldn't move back there, but it's funny when you spend a bit of time in the place where you were brought up. You kind of realize how that place has had quite a big effect on you or made you a certain way.

Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong.

You have to create a bespoke cultural environment. I know this may be a kind of thing that an old person says, but I feel to quite a large extent I was reared by the TV I watched.

In some ways, I always thought you're better off behaving like a rock star when you're a normal person. Because if you do it as a rock star, you'll end up in the papers and your life will be made a misery.

I'm a sluggish character; I'm a bit slow. For some reason I find it hard to work quickly.

Pornography takes all the reality out of sex and Disney does that to family life.