Best 110 quotes of Pete Townshend on MyQuotes

Pete Townshend

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    Any fool can hide, few can play.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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?

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    Here comes the new boss Same as the old boss.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.'

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    I'll spend my mornings at the sunshine café.

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    Pete Townshend

    I'm an air-conditioned gypsy.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

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

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    Pete Townshend

    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.

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    Pete Townshend

    I smash guitars because I like them.

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    Pete Townshend

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