Todd Rundgren Quotes

If you're not satisfied with the way the world is, or if you think the world can be better, you have to figure out a way to know yourself and better yourself. Then you have the assurance that something in the world has improved.

There are any number of conditions as to why your life didn't turn out the way you intended it to. My whole philosophy has always been that there is no way to change anything else in the world if you don't have the capacity to change yourself.

I don't want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.

So I don't think I'm gonna pull my head into my shell just because a bunch of people start acting like idiots.

Recorded music has always been in a sense promotion for live performance, and some artists have discovered that giving it away is as effective as trying to sell it.

There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.

I've always said, rather glibly, that the message of my career has been about individualism, about getting to know yourself and taking responsibility, not just for what you do, but what you think.

I don't have the same restrictions that other people do because I never painted myself into a corner. I've always done things that didn't necessarily fit the form. I've never felt limited in that respect in terms of songwriting.

I know that I could make this world peaceful and calm, if I only could get my hands on a hydrogen bomb.

Look upon yourself only with compassion.

Make music a service that's easy to consume, and there'll be plenty of money for everyone.

Love between the ugly, is the most beautiful love of all

It's the only way that YOUR life is gonna have any value to you. If you're just living the same life that everybody else is living what's the point?

If you will, then you will, for nothing can withstand your will. As your faith is, so you are, where your mind is there you are.

I'd like to continue to play until I drop dead on stage or something.

Singles needed to come back. And what I tried to do in my online experiment was to change the rules for myself and make available at a more regular pace the fruits of my labour, for people who decided they wanted to support my recordings.

Michael Jackson is a cake-and-eat-it kind of guy. He has never recognized or accepted the fact that when you shove yourself in people's face, they're not going to look just at the part you're showing them. People want to see everything that's connected to the face.

Artists should re-emphasize performance and de-emphasize recording. You always make more money if you have a healthy performing life than you will if you have even a moderately healthy recording life. Don't make recording the most important thing you do. Make performing the most important thing you do, and then you can make recordings and sell them at your shows, because record labels aren't going to be around to help you get on the radio stations, and the radio stations probably aren't going to play you anyway.

People who have memorized your songs-how can you not love them?

It's never the same relationship. I see my job as filling in the blanks. Whatever it is that the artist lacks in the process of making a record, I'm supposed to fill that in. And sometimes it's a lot of stuff and I have to hector them about working on the material and that sort of thing. Sometimes you have an artist that's really fairly self-sufficient; they just need another ear to offer some objective criticism, but otherwise pretty much know what they're doing. It varies a lot.

Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny. A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process.

I guess country music works better in supermarkets.

There must be a God because he made me.

I've been essentially not only deconstructing and reconstructing the material to make it suitable for the performance, but I've gone back and found some older material that's appropriate for the show and I've re-recorded that as well in kind of a newer format. So I've been pretty much focused on my own thing.

I suppose people also have to be a little more careful or circumspect if they're going to leverage their celebrity to promote their political aims. The problem is that politics is about the accretion of power, and it's very difficult not to get giddy with power.