Quotes by Pete Townshend

Do you realize why is it Im so driven to operate within the Establishment? Its vengeance. Hope I die before I get old is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.

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

Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they dont have, beauty they havent worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.

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

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.

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. Id first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.

We didnt 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.

I am growing old of course, but I am still in the early stages of disintegration, and regarded as just about cool enough by some fashionable young ppl to be permitted to think aloud.

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

I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.

Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury was trying to keep his homosexuality from the front pages, Boy George was openly & outrageously gay.

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 ones 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.

His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath.

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

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. Im not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

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

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

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

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.

Its sad when people break up.