Top 140 Jack White Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There’s Catholic guilt about things, then there’s the guilt of being the youngest of 10, so when nice things happen to you, you’re not really allowed to enjoy them.”

— Jack White

52. “I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan.”

— Jack White

53. “Captain Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was one of a kind. I’m sure he would agree to this truth, If you continuously compete with others, you will become bitter. If you constantly compete with yourself, you can become great.”

— Jack White

54. “I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you’re left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you’re just left with rhythm.”

— Jack White

55. “I dislike the word ‘emerging artist.’ Emerging connotes to me an alligator coming up from the water. I consider all artists to be artists, not rising, emerging, amateur, beginning, but the real thing.”

— Jack White

56. “Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Auto-tuning doesn’t do anything for creativity. Yeah, it makes it easier and you can get home sooner; but it doesn’t make you a more creative person. That’s the disease we have to fight in any creative field: ease of use.”

— Jack White

57. “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I’ll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.”

— Jack White

58. “Punk is an attitude, not a genre, age group, or time period. What’s interesting is trying to define the blues and punk in different ways. They are very close cousins.”

— Jack White

59. “With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black.”

— Jack White

60. “We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.”

— Jack White

61. “When you put something out there into the world, there’s all these words you don’t want to hear, that you hope people don’t say. I don’t like anything that starts with ‘re’ – like retro, reinvent, recreate – I hate that. It’s always like living in the past – copying, emulating.”

— Jack White

62. “Your passion must be tempered with patience. Maybe long-suffering patience would be a better word.”

— Jack White

63. “I’ve always loved the word blunderbuss. I’ve always thought that it was a beautiful word and that it could mean several different things.”

— Jack White

64. “I’d got accepted to the seminary in Wisconsin, and I was gonna become a priest, but the last second I thought, ‘I’ll just go to public school.’ I had just gotten a new amplifier in my bedroom, and I didn’t think I was allowed to take it with me.”

— Jack White

65. “What you think is fake in your head comes off as not enough on camera, a lot of times. You almost have to overdo it, in this overly, sort of Broadway, large-gestures kind of way to come off as being realistic on camera. It’s strange. You almost have to act really fake to come off looking real.”

— Jack White

66. “You want to figure out how you want to play the guitar; what your niche would be. Well you just start digging deeper. When you’re digging deeper in rock and roll you’re on a freight train heading straight for the blues.”

— Jack White

67. “I certainly wouldn’t want a song that I’d already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange.”

— Jack White

68. “I never wanted to play guitar when I was younger. I wanted to be a drummer because everybody plays guitar, and I didn’t want to do what everybody else wanted to do.”

— Jack White

69. “Worry means tormenting yourself with disturbing thoughts or fretting about things we have zero control over. If you live in the north there is no need to worry about the snow. You will get plenty each year. If you live in California or Texas you needn’t worry about rain because we won’t receive any.”

— Jack White

70. “If you have twenty guys in the room and you just bring in one girl, you change the entire mood and everyone plays different.”

— Jack White

71. “The biggest failures come round and spring ultimate surprises of survival.”

— Jack White

72. “I’m always afraid, because I do most of my stuff at home, where nobody bothers me, and I don’t have to stroke somebody’s ego or be careful about hurting someone’s feelings. But I also want to know that I can still go into the world and be with other people and make music.”

— Jack White

73. “It’s kind of ridiculous that I find inspiration in just getting away from everything. But when you’ve gone through it, you realize that it’s the enemy. It’s a distraction from what you’re really doing. You’ve got to keep moving. Like a shark.”

— Jack White

74. “Playing drums feels like coming home for me. Even during the White Stripes I thought: ‘I’ll do this for now, but I’m really a drummer.’ That’s what I’ll put on my passport application.”

— Jack White

75. “If you don’t have a struggle inside or around you, you have to make one up.”

— Jack White

76. “I think the sensitivity that you need to create certain things sometimes would spill over into things that shouldn’t have bothered me.”

— Jack White

77. “It’s funny because when you do become successful, you’re forced to look backwards and try to crawl back into the womb where you first started to create.”

— Jack White

78. “Like it or not, people tend to buy paintings to match their drapes, couch or carpet. I know you want them to be so overwhelmed with your skills they can’t resist hauling your art home. These three factors are what dictate most art sales.”

— Jack White

79. “I think I’ve been a good boy long enough and given everyone around me a fair piece of the pie as far as all of the fleeting glory and reward that comes from the heavens – or the music press, whatever you want to call it.”

— Jack White

80. “The most exciting rock ‘n’ roll band of the last 50 years who are still on the road today.”

— Jack White

81. “Art doesn’t sell itself, it has to be sold.”

— Jack White

82. “I’ve always felt it’s ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You’re my friend, you’re my wife, you’re my girlfriend, you’re my co-worker. ‘This is your box, and you’re not allowed to stray outside of it.’”

— Jack White

83. “You need a little resistance-something to fight against.”

— Jack White

84. “I think that sometimes love gets in the way of itself – you know, love interrupts itself. We want things so much that we sabotage them.”

— Jack White

85. “The big picture is a nice way to think of things if you have the freedom to.”

— Jack White

86. “I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ and stare at their mobiles.”

— Jack White

87. “I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played ‘Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits’ – in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.”

— Jack White

88. “You can’t steal an artist’s songs and also tell him he can’t license that music to a commercial.”

— Jack White

89. “All of us need to self-promote. We cannot sit back and wait for our gallery or rep to do it all.”

— Jack White

90. “I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I’m not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don’t want to come off egotistical.”

— Jack White

91. “A lot of people in the media, and some everyday people, really aren’t in search of the truth. They’re in search of something worse than that. Money, yeah. I think the media’s the kind of a thing where the truth doesn’t win, because it’s no fun. The truth’s no fun.”

— Jack White

92. “My mother’s the youngest of 10 children too, so we have sort of a special bond in that we know what that feels like. It’s a strange spot to be in.”

— Jack White

93. “I am a commercial artist because I paint to earn a living. We who earn money from what we produce are all commercial artists.”

— Jack White

94. “It was really hard to find people to come over and play guitar and sing and write songs together. So that turned me into a songwriter that way, just so I could be able to play with other people.”

— Jack White

95. “The wonderful news is that when a person with my lack of art background can be successful, then anyone can. I’m not super talented and had no art training. Nothing, nada, zip. No workshops or classes.”

— Jack White

96. “It’s a sound bite. It’s very of this age, because that’s what people want.”

— Jack White

97. “I probably could have a hip-hop-style entourage of 40 people coming with me to the club or whatever, and I don’t do that. And I think sometimes maybe I should. It just makes things easier – if you don’t like being by yourself, maybe just don’t do it ever.”

— Jack White

98. “There are distractions, all around. There’s so much media, for a young kid to battle against, to get to something soulful. You have to make a decision, on your own, what you can take from these people, if you can dig deeper. It’s nice to be able to let people dig deeper.”

— Jack White

99. “I’d make a White Stripes record right now. I’d be in the White Stripes for the rest of my life. That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. I wish it was still here. It’s something I really, really miss.”

— Jack White

100. “The day that music is taken for free by the majority is the day that the phrase “sell out” doesn’t exist any more.”

— Jack White