Top 35 Jonny Greenwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m pampered like you wouldn’t believe.”

— Jonny Greenwood

2. “I suppose all of us – we have the old Protestant work ethic of feeling guilty when you’re not working, and getting a buzz from feeling like you’re really busy. That’s the reason to sort of carry on.”

— Jonny Greenwood

3. “It feels like Radiohead are famous, but that no one knows who we are. Which is brilliant, really.”

— Jonny Greenwood

4. “As soon as you impose Western chords on an Indian scale, something great collapses.”

— Jonny Greenwood

5. “Jamaican reggae is the style of music I always reach for when ranting to friends about how you could listen to one style of music exclusively for the rest of your life – and it would all be great and varied and worth hearing.”

— Jonny Greenwood

6. “Anything that has more of Graham’s guitar playing, I’m bound to like.”

— Jonny Greenwood

7. “Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives – and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that’s as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.”

— Jonny Greenwood

8. “When people say you’re doing something radical in rock or dance music, I’m not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It’s like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.”

— Jonny Greenwood

9. “I’m quite into listening to music and not doing anything else.”

— Jonny Greenwood

10. “Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments, and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved – and while the reverence given to guitars annoys me, I shall miss it.”

— Jonny Greenwood

11. “Obviously there will be a backlash. If you believe the hype you have to believe a backlash too. Any criticism we get, is always stuff we’ve already criticized ourselves.”

— Jonny Greenwood

12. “Nothing’s more exciting than a day in a studio with a string section – or more ruinously expensive. So it’s good to feed that habit away from the band, especially if it means more experience for the next Radiohead string day.”

— Jonny Greenwood

13. “I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.”

— Jonny Greenwood

14. “Maybe I’m used to religious music being gentler in the classical world.”

— Jonny Greenwood

15. “But I was in the Radiohead studio today and Phil was there drumming and Thom was there playing. We feel like we’ve only just stopped and already people are wanting us to carry on.”

— Jonny Greenwood

16. “The strangest part of Indian music is its lack of chords: There’s no such thing as major or minor, and it’s unusual to hear more than two different pitches at the same time.”

— Jonny Greenwood

17. “I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago – you’d have to put that into better English for me, thank you – they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.”

— Jonny Greenwood

18. “I think It’s a bit of a disappointment that a lot of people’s Golden Age of music is still the ’60s.”

— Jonny Greenwood

19. “As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written – but not really of how they played. So I’d daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them.”

— Jonny Greenwood

20. “I remember when I was in my late teens just getting rid of lots of records, realizing I only ever listened to them when I was reading, or watching TV, or doing something else.”

— Jonny Greenwood

Featured in: Reading Quotes

21. “Everything I do feels like It’s going to end up being in Radiohead.”

— Jonny Greenwood

22. “Every American college student goes to college with a hard drive. They take their laptop. There’s not a CD player in sight.”

— Jonny Greenwood

23. “I can remember soundtracks that you just can’t separate from the film – It’s just so intertwined, so important. Like the Hitchcock ones where they kind of inform each other and become this larger thing as a result.”

— Jonny Greenwood

24. “Rock music is quite big in India – but it mostly just replaces all the intricacies of Indian rhythms and Indian melody with lumpen rock drumming and power chords.”

— Jonny Greenwood

25. “I was just very conscious that I could either bore people by having the music be similar for too long, or I could just wear them out and bore them in a different way by having it changing too much every minute or two minutes. So, there was that kind of balance to get right.”

— Jonny Greenwood

26. “I sometimes wish taste wasn’t ever an issue, and the sounds of instruments or synths could be judged solely on their colour and timbre. Judged by what it did to your ears, rather than what its historical use reminds you of.”

— Jonny Greenwood

27. “But over a period of time It’s the melodic things that are in my head all day.”

— Jonny Greenwood

28. “I’m happy to write 10 times too much music.”

— Jonny Greenwood

29. “I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things.”

— Jonny Greenwood

30. “It’s like that scene from The Player when they talk about merging Star Wars and Kramer vs. Kramer, or whatever. You could do that with music and it would just be awful.”

— Jonny Greenwood

31. “It’s what the Pixies always said about music – they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it.”

— Jonny Greenwood

Featured in: Reading Quotes

32. “I think guitarists are really over-admired and over-revered.”

— Jonny Greenwood

33. “I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.”

— Jonny Greenwood

34. “Everything I know about pop culture I know from ‘The Simpsons,’ and they say the Grammys aren’t very good.”

— Jonny Greenwood

35. “I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles.”

— Jonny Greenwood