Top 80 Iggy Pop Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, ‘We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.’”

— Iggy Pop

52. “I have a hot memory, but I know I’ve forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.”

— Iggy Pop

53. “It’s the same thing: I would think, “If I can’t go out and pull some teenager tonight, maybe I’m no good on stage anymore.” And you start to think that you even need it as a motivation. I did, anyway.”

— Iggy Pop

54. “I like music that’s more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.”

— Iggy Pop

55. “Well, it wasn’t like I was going to run out and score heroin and score an ounce of coke – but incidentally, on the road, I would usually get tanked up and as stoned as I possibly could to go on stage. And offstage, it would be a demon that would come up about twice a week.”

— Iggy Pop

56. “A lot of young musicians get the money at the wrong time. They get it for something they don’t feel great about, and it’ll make you feel so bad it’ll destroy you and kill you.”

— Iggy Pop

57. “Look, you’re here to see me, and I can’t go on until my dealer is here, and he’s waiting to be paid, so give me some money so I can fix up, and then you’ll get your show.”

— Iggy Pop

58. “My mom was a saint. She taught me to be terminally nice.”

— Iggy Pop

59. “Stages are getting higher and higher, and I’m getting older and older.”

— Iggy Pop

60. “If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.”

— Iggy Pop

61. “The key to The Doors is the culture behind the myth.”

— Iggy Pop

62. “The nut of the thing is that if what you make is hard like a diamond, you can put it anywhere. You can put it up your and it will still be beautiful.”

— Iggy Pop

63. “At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.”

— Iggy Pop

64. “Living in England was wonderfully civil and easy-going.”

— Iggy Pop

65. “In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music – you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards – they didn’t get any money at first. They were all broke.”

— Iggy Pop

66. “I spent most of the eighties, most of my life, riding around in somebody else’s car, in possession of, or ingested of, something illegal, on my way from something illegal to something illegal with many illegal things happening all around me.”

— Iggy Pop

67. “I’m not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don’t get “Iggy Sings.” I am also a style of music, an approach.”

— Iggy Pop

68. “Musical types tend to combine the burden of the author with the burden of the actor.”

— Iggy Pop

69. “The 2 things I like the most are girls and loud noises.”

— Iggy Pop

70. “I’ve probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.”

— Iggy Pop

71. “Life is just a bag of pot.”

— Iggy Pop

72. “If I don’t terrorize, I’m not Pop.”

— Iggy Pop

73. “I try to beat back the producers and engineers so they – there’s not an excess of stuff used to squeeze my voice to make it artificial. There’s a person in there, and people will listen; if they hear another person speak to them, they’ll listen because it’s lonely out here.”

— Iggy Pop

74. “I was feeling that I was the in the dead-end circuit from 1980 to 1983, and I didn’t know what else to do. I remember doing a show in some college town, in a tiny club, and afterward some fans came back. I thought I had done good gig and they were going to tell me that.”

— Iggy Pop

75. “Studios are like hospitals. A lot of people check in, and they don’t check out.”

— Iggy Pop

76. “And if somebody’s going to produce me, they should be producing my sound for me. And that’s something I have to come up with myself.”

— Iggy Pop

77. “I don’t think I’m lucky; I think I have a tough constitution. That’s a lot of it. And I’ve been wise enough to listen to other people. I was unconsciously cultivating as many straight friends as I could.”

— Iggy Pop

78. “Basically, I’m a musical vocalist, but I do voiceover stuff as a sideline, like plumbing or something.”

— Iggy Pop

79. “Well, the stuff that has become more commercial doesn’t have any edge.”

— Iggy Pop

80. “I think that all the years of exposure to amps and electricity has altered my body chemistry.”

— Iggy Pop

81. “I like semi-torn-down places where I could get nestled in and get something done without anyone bothering me.”

— Iggy Pop

82. “My general take on American music since 1969 is that it’s just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight – audience, performance, and palace guard.”

— Iggy Pop

83. “It’s fair to say that I have a side that is prudent and a side that is not.”

— Iggy Pop

84. “Your skin starts itching once you buy that gimmick about something called love.”

— Iggy Pop