Top 180 Lou Reed Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “As you practice things, you get better. I mean I’ve worked very hard on changing my life and taking what is good about it and trying to jettison the things I think were not good about it. I think the key word is “discipline,” focus. I’m always working at it, but I’m not always successful.”

— Lou Reed

102. “I’m not joking around when I’ve said occasionally, trying to learn how to play a D chord properly has been a very big thing for me.”

— Lou Reed

103. “Dear Pope, send me some hope or a rope.”

— Lou Reed

104. “I dreamed that I was young and smart, and it was not a waste. I dreamed that there was a point of life, and to the human race.”

— Lou Reed

105. “An eye for an eye is elemental.”

— Lou Reed

106. “I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look, a talking book that contained keys to past and present memories.”

— Lou Reed

107. “One of my rules is: Never listen to your old stuff.”

— Lou Reed

108. “I wouldn’t want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It’s very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don’t have the bass, it’s like being amputated. It’s like you have no legs.”

— Lou Reed

109. “I don’t think anybody is anybody else’s moral compass.”

— Lou Reed

110. “All the people have gone to war leaving no interrogator to mind.”

— Lou Reed

111. “You can’t ask me to explain the lyrics because I won’t do it.”

— Lou Reed

112. “I’d harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.”

— Lou Reed

113. “The gay people know where I’m at. Straight people may not know where I’m at, but they find it kind of interesting when they show up and see what is sitting around them.”

— Lou Reed

114. “Any human being should have a tolerance for anybody.”

— Lou Reed

115. “As the dead rise to live, the live sink to die, the currents are deep and raging inside.”

— Lou Reed

116. “You won’t see my parents honored on any stamps.”

— Lou Reed

117. “I write whatever shows up. That’s good enough for me. I’m part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.”

— Lou Reed

118. “With Master Ren, if I’d tell him I can’t do that and he’d say, yes you can, and it turns out I very much can do it.”

— Lou Reed

119. “I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage.”

— Lou Reed

120. “Meditation doesn’t have to be complicated. What I do is about as simple as you can get. You could just count the beads, one, two, three, with your eyes closed or open, whatever makes you happy.”

— Lou Reed

121. “Music is an amazing thing. I don’t know if we really think about it the same way we consider a painting an amazing thing. I mean, a painting is, in quotes, imaginary. There is nothing on the canvas when you start; and writing a song, there is nothing there when you start.”

— Lou Reed

122. “I’m still not sure I didn’t die.”

— Lou Reed

123. “I’ve become completely well adjusted to being a cult figure.”

— Lou Reed

124. “I can concentrate on my art.”

— Lou Reed

125. “Some people drink to unleash their libidos, and other people drink to prop up their egos.”

— Lou Reed

126. “The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.”

— Lou Reed

127. “My attitude is that you very rarely come in contact with someone of Master Ren’s level, so every opportunity I could get to learn from him I wanted to do that.”

— Lou Reed

128. “Jealousy endlessly eats through my mind, and jealously endlessly makes me be unkind.”

— Lou Reed

129. “Well, everybody does something, some people race cars, others collect stamps, I find tai chi to be philosophically, aesthetically, physically and spiritually fascinating.”

— Lou Reed

130. “Some even claim that I’m a terror, a dictator and they’re right.”

— Lou Reed

131. “I can’t tell the difference between wrong and right, are you laughing at me?”

— Lou Reed

132. “I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn’t any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That’s my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.”

— Lou Reed

133. “It’s fun to be in a small club and to be able to look somebody right in the eye and watch them just freak. Then it’s fun to be in front of thousands of people and watch a couple of hundred freaking out of their minds.”

— Lou Reed

134. “But I’m also talented and I know when I created something great and Perfect Night is something great, no doubt, no but.”

— Lou Reed

135. “I don’t really think about what the subject of my next album will be. I just know that I’m going to make another album.”

— Lou Reed

136. “I’ve gone out with my shotgun. This is hunting country out there. You better run.”

— Lou Reed

137. “Over what guilty spirit to not hear the beating, to not hear the beating, but only tears of perfect moan, only tears of perfect moan.”

— Lou Reed

138. “I always thought martial arts was the most modern choreography we could have right now, and I always wanted to put it to music.”

— Lou Reed

139. “What I really love is my scotch. It’s the power, the power of positive drinking.”

— Lou Reed

140. “I’ve never been super confident about anything. The work is never as good as it could be.”

— Lou Reed

141. “I have no control over the audience. I have no idea what they think. My heart’s pure. I can’t do anything. I really can’t do anything. I don’t know what goes on in the crowd.”

— Lou Reed

142. “I don’t think I’m in any position to call myself a martial artist. I’m a student of the martial arts.”

— Lou Reed

143. “Psychologically, it’s better that I think that I’m dirt.”

— Lou Reed

144. “There were lots of things that I recognized from my experience with Eagle Claw and Wu Hao, and here was the combination of the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole tamale in one.”

— Lou Reed

145. “When he beat my mother it made me so mad.”

— Lou Reed

146. “I think it’s pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.”

— Lou Reed

147. “It’s depressing when you’re still around and your albums are out of print.”

— Lou Reed

148. “Eve kissed Able, that’s how he got murdered by Cain.”

— Lou Reed

149. “Senator, it has been reported that you have had illegal congress with your mother.”

— Lou Reed

150. “I don’t know anyone actually who does care what a critic says.”

— Lou Reed