Top 40 Chrissie Hynde Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It’s like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.”

— Chrissie Hynde

2. “The meat industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars lying to the public about their product. But no amount of false propaganda can sanitize meat. The facts are absolutely clear: Eating meat is bad for human health, catastrophic for the environment, and a living nightmare for animals.”

— Chrissie Hynde

Featured in: Quotes About Veganism

3. “One person can make all the difference in the world. For the first time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands.”

— Chrissie Hynde

4. “No amount of false propaganda can sanitize meat.”

— Chrissie Hynde

5. “I have no sense of patriotism, but I do have a sense of community.”

— Chrissie Hynde

6. “I don’t believe there is any justifiable reason for killing any animal unless perhaps if it’s killing you! That would be negotiable.”

— Chrissie Hynde

7. “There are no real men.”

— Chrissie Hynde

8. “Confidence is usually a bluff – if you’re lucky you might have it, but frankly nobody will know the difference.”

— Chrissie Hynde

9. “Don’t get a job in an abattoir. Don’t be a butcher. The idea that people have to do these jobs for a livelihood is ridiculous. They can get other jobs. Shoplift, man. Better to be a prostitute than cut an animal’s head off for a living.”

— Chrissie Hynde

10. “In my experience lust only ever leads to misery. All that suspicion and jealousy and anguish it unleashes. I don’t want those things in my life.”

— Chrissie Hynde

11. “What characterized the whole punk scene for me in 1977 was there was no racism or sexism. It was an anarchy of -isms, and a matter of abolishing it all.”

— Chrissie Hynde

12. “I feel displaced when I’m back in America, like a visitor. I feel like if I don’t get a cup of tea I’m going to lose my mind.”

— Chrissie Hynde

13. “All these fifty-year-old guys wearing baseball caps and shorts and acting like children. It winds me up. Men don’t have to take responsibility anymore. Most of the guys I know would punch me on the nose for saying this, but maybe we do have to bring back conscription.”

— Chrissie Hynde

14. “There’sthemeat eaters and there’sus. And that’stheway I look at the world.”

— Chrissie Hynde

15. “The Clash were innovative, radical and helped drive a change in music that was ground-breaking. In comparison to some of the music today they sounded like they meant it. I still listen to their music today to remind myself what music made with commitment sounds like.”

— Chrissie Hynde

16. “I was a single mom with two kids. What else was I going to do? It was either be in a band or be a waitress.”

— Chrissie Hynde

17. “How much did you get for your soul?”

— Chrissie Hynde

18. “Well, ’any experience is better than no experience;, was my motto.”

— Chrissie Hynde

19. “The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I’m a feminist. That suits me fine.”

— Chrissie Hynde

20. “Before Janis Joplin even hit the stage I was remarking to my friends how incredible the light show was. “Chris, the show hasn’t started yet,” they replied. But on three different tabs of acid, guess what, the show HAD started.”

— Chrissie Hynde

21. “Songwriting is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, and it doesn’t make any sense until you find that last piece. It has to make sense or it doesn’t work.”

— Chrissie Hynde

22. “Smoking while vacuuming makes vacuuming better but smoking while sitting on the couch makes vacuuming harder.”

— Chrissie Hynde

23. “I preferred rock when it was in the dark, when it was a secret between me and the audience, when it wasn’t mainstream.”

— Chrissie Hynde

24. “Yeah, the industry has always been both the enemy and the best friend of the artist. They need each other. That’s the bottom line.”

— Chrissie Hynde

25. “A ballad once in a while doesn’t go amiss.”

— Chrissie Hynde

26. “It’s always sad when you start to hate what you love.”

— Chrissie Hynde

27. “I just want to play guitar and be in a band. Same as I always did.”

— Chrissie Hynde

28. “I don’t think it’s good to be sentimental, so I try not to be.”

— Chrissie Hynde

29. “You try to be arrogant in songs because you can’t be in real life.”

— Chrissie Hynde

30. “Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.”

— Chrissie Hynde

31. “I was constantly imagining a couple of comic or sci-fi writers at the end of the fifties, stoned on weed and speed, trying to outdo each other with outrageous scenarios of the Beat world of the future. It was called England.”

— Chrissie Hynde

32. “It’s amazing how much can happen in a few weeks on the road. This was going to become a habit to me; seeing new places would become like a drug. Better than drugs. And there was a whole world still to discover. I was as optimistic as a junkie in a poppy field.”

— Chrissie Hynde

33. “When you’re alone and don’t know anybody it’s easy to meet people.”

— Chrissie Hynde

34. “Everybody had to own and maintain a car. It was the biggest con in the Land of the Free. Well, along with the tobacco and alcohol industries, which also pumped out poison and had the nation in their grip. Pharmaceuticals and firearms would join the party in due course.”

— Chrissie Hynde

35. “After writing a song, there’s first a feeling of elation followed by the sinking feeling that it will never happen again, and you go back to thinking that you can’t do it. It creates an ongoing feeling of inadequacy.”

— Chrissie Hynde

36. “I held my plastic “Jesus Saves” cross near a lightbulb before going to bed so it would glow in the dark. I didn’t think I was religious and didn’t think about whether I believed or not. Having said that, I could never understand how anyone with a modicum of rebelliousness or sense of fair play couldn’t appreciate He who hung with lowlifes and healed the sick. I especially liked the story about Him driving those merchants out of the temple. Even Jesus could lose it if pressed.”

— Chrissie Hynde

37. “I enjoy my little meditations and find that humor is everywhere once you strip away your grief.”

— Chrissie Hynde

38. “They say you always feel better after a good cry but when does the feeling better start?”

— Chrissie Hynde

39. “So I listened to Jimmy and he always had the answer. That lasted another fifteen years or so, Jimmy in my ear telling me what to do, and then slowly, he seemed to fade away.”

— Chrissie Hynde

40. “I can’t not be alive.”

— Chrissie Hynde