Best 18 quotes of Mark E. Smith on MyQuotes

A lot of musicians are really hard to deal with. They aren't as smart as me.

Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?

Every day is great for me. I dislike rose-coloured glasses.

I can write, boy, I can write. That's what I do. The trouble is that it's too bloody easy for people, that's why music is in the sorry state that it is. Any idiot, actors mainly, can go in there, sing a chord, bang on a machine... I'm not objecting to that but when people get at me for trying to say something in a rock 'n' roll mode it's as if I'm the freak.

I do feel like an outsider, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

I don't want security guards. I don't think security guards are particularly good for your writing.

If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.

I read daft history books. Sometimes the books I read are a bit crackers or strange.

It's just like music when you reckon it up. It's like, listening to Pavement, it's just the Fall in 1985, isn't it? They haven't got an original idea in their heads.

I used to be psychic, but I drank my way out of it.

I was picked on because I was timid. I had younger sisters; I couldn't turn to them for help. I didn't have an older brother.

My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.

The gigs I enjoy are the ones where I'm so angry and paranoid, and I hate the audience so much, that I put everything into it to feed off the aggressive side of it. I don't actually hate the fans but when I'm feeling angry, pissed off, and full of hate, it's a good gig for me.

The thing with me. I can't stick musicians. I've thought about this. I can't stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that's my strength I can hear what they can't.

We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group, like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said, 'Shut them cunts up!' And they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said, 'That's the Sons of Mumford' or something. 'They're number five in charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers.

When I was 14 I used to have a calendar on my wall, crossing the days off until I was 15, because the school leaving age was 15. Then three months before I turned 15 they changed the leaving age to 16.

I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve. Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.

There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation -- the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living.