Pete Townshend Quotes - Page 3

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

I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.

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.

I don't really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue.

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood.

Give love, and keep blood between brothers

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.

I don't need to fight / To prove I'm right / I don't need to be forgiven

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.

The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

Your love is like heroin.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you.

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?

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.