Pete Townshend quotes:

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

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.

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

Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

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.

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.

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.

I smash guitars because I like them.

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.

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

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.

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

Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.

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.

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.

It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.

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.

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

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.

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.

We are musicians, entertainers. We can do it. We have the right tools. No worries.

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.'

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.

Respect yourself. Try to remember that not everything in life can be perfect. You will make mistakes. That's inevitable. But you are not ugly. You will only be ugly when you behave in an ugly way.

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

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

Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.

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.

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.

I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.

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

The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.

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.

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.

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.

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

In 1945 music had a serious purpose; to defy post war depression & revitalize the romantic & hopeful aspirations of an exhausted ppl.

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

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.

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

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

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces I sing my heart out to the infinite sea I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains I sing my song to the free.

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 am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.

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.

Once she woke with untamed lover's face between her legs, now he's cooled and stifled and it's she who has to beg.

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

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.

The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter.

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

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.

Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.

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.

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.

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

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

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

Any fool can hide, few can play.

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

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts.

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

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.

Don't cry Don't raise your eye Its only teenage wasteland.

Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.

Even as age humbles me it feeds my arrogance. There is still nothing that interests me as much as myself.

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

Give love, and keep blood between brothers

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?

Here comes the new boss Same as the old boss.

I am an animal, my teeth are sharp and my mouth is full, and the passion is strong.

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

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

I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.

I played the guitar for ten years before I realized it wasn't a weapon.

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

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

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

I want fast food, pretty naked girls preferably tattooed.

I want to age with some dignity.

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

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

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

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.

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

I'll spend my mornings at the sunshine café.

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

I'M FREE! - I'm free, And freedom tastes of reality, I'm free - I'm free, An' I'm waiting for you to follow me.

It's sad when people break up.

It's terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.

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.

It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along.

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

Let my love open the door To yourheart.

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

Link is a quiet man to meet- easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside he gets very very mean very often. I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard Rumble , and yet very excited by the guitar sound. And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson. We met him in New York in 1970 while recording Who's Next.... this later inspired the b-side Wasp Man, a tune we dedicated to Link Wray.

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

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.