Top 50 Nick Lowe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding.”

— Nick Lowe

2. “I’m very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don’t actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.”

— Nick Lowe

3. “I like being a big fish in a small pond. I’m not interested in a huge audience because it brings headaches.”

— Nick Lowe

4. “Cruel to be kind means that I love you.”

— Nick Lowe

5. “Bash it out now, tart it up later.”

— Nick Lowe

6. “I love the sound of breaking glass Especially when Im lonely I need the noises of destruction When theres nothing new.”

— Nick Lowe

7. “You try to make every word count, so there’s no doubt what you’re talking about. When you’re young, you waffle away. Well, I’m done with that. I think it’s much more interesting to say just what you mean.”

— Nick Lowe

8. “These days, rock ‘n’ roll is much more about rock than about roll. I don’t do rock. But I’m interested in that roll part, because that’s the funny little bit that makes it hip.”

— Nick Lowe

9. “When I find a cover song that I like, I’ll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.”

— Nick Lowe

10. “I’m very fussy about how my records sound, but I’m very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don’t do it that way.”

— Nick Lowe

11. “London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You’re in charge for a bit and then you don’t go out anymore. You say, “Oh god, it’s going to be too crowded.””

— Nick Lowe

12. “I’m an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven’t written it. That’s when I’m satisfied.”

— Nick Lowe

13. “I don’t have the faith now. I certainly believe in Jesus – you know, that he existed and he was a very nice man. And who can disagree with a simple philosophy of treat other people like you’d like to be treated yourself? It’s absolutely – nothing I can disagree with that.”

— Nick Lowe

14. “Later in life, suddenly, if you’re an outsider, it’s something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people’s nerves.”

— Nick Lowe

15. “If a hit came along, I wouldn’t be unhappy about that. But I’m a bit too old for that now-doing videos and all those types of TV shows. I’ve kind of done all that, in the ’70s.”

— Nick Lowe

16. “You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after – well, however long it can take – sometimes a few days, sometimes months – you piece the whole thing together.”

— Nick Lowe

17. “I’ve always felt quite like an outsider. I don’t really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.”

— Nick Lowe

18. “Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I’d been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.”

— Nick Lowe

19. “When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.”

— Nick Lowe

20. “The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.”

— Nick Lowe

21. “Be a military flier or be in a band; those were the two hippest things I could imagine.”

— Nick Lowe

22. “And there were sort of three toys for boys and three toys for girls. And the boys I can remember was, well, there was a Dan Dare Ray Gun. Dan Dare was a sort of a cartoon character. He was just sort of a – he was like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, only in space.”

— Nick Lowe

23. “As long as my body holds out, I’ll be grooving when I’m 70, and not some sort of horrible spectacle.”

— Nick Lowe

24. “In the ’70s, you had to come up with an album every year whether you were ready or not.”

— Nick Lowe

25. “The older I get, there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely more interesting than talking about love and the lack of it and what happens when it’s taken away from someone who’s had it.”

— Nick Lowe

26. “It was the 1950s, you know, and they had a ray gun, which was basically a flashlight with a sort of trigger on it. And it buzzed and a red light, you know, came on. But anyway we all had one – Davy Crockett hat.”

— Nick Lowe

27. “I knew how the suits used to talk about the artists, with barely concealed contempt. So I knew what was waiting for me round the corner. Because I wasn’t one of those very unusual people like Neil Diamond or Elton John, whose careers just seem to span the decades. I knew I wasn’t one of them.”

— Nick Lowe

28. “To a certain extent, yes, we do. But there’s – but there’s a very limited menu. There’s only about sort of 20 songs that you hear on rotation.”

— Nick Lowe

29. “The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn’t cross the road to see them. It’s people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.”

— Nick Lowe

30. “If anyone comes along, I’m more than happy to welcome them, but I’m not interested in world domination.”

— Nick Lowe

31. “Elvis Costello had a brand new bag. He was a musician, but he knew all about the attitude part of it.”

— Nick Lowe

32. “When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, “God, how am I going to do something after I’m forty?” I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.”

— Nick Lowe

33. “I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don’t really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can’t. It’s really peculiar.”

— Nick Lowe

34. “I loved Christmas. We had a really great time. But there wasn’t – it was all – you had to be happy with, you know, an orange and a couple of walnuts, you know, in your stocking.”

— Nick Lowe

35. “And after, you know, having the old chicken or whatever it is they bring around and a couple of cocktails, you turn to the person sitting next to you and say, you know, you going home, then?”

— Nick Lowe

36. “I’m still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.”

— Nick Lowe

37. “I use the name and the thought very, very easily as a sort of comfort – as a kind of comfort, in some way. And in that way, it’s just like having a friend, I suppose.”

— Nick Lowe

38. “It’s like a little folk song. I think it might’ve been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And “Merry Christmas, Everybody” by Slade, which is a rock group – a rock-pop group who are very big over there.”

— Nick Lowe

39. “You’ve got to really know your song, inside and out.”

— Nick Lowe

40. “I used to sort of take the phone off the hook, you know, put my feet up and watch the TV until it was all over.”

— Nick Lowe

41. “I think the best songs that come to me are ones that you sort of listen for. The ones – when I listen to some of my old stuff, I can tell when I had a good idea, but I forced it through, and I can hear myself – the bit that I’ve written, which sounds clunkier than the stuff that just sort of comes.”

— Nick Lowe

42. “Well, this is shortly after the idea was put to me because it wasn’t my idea to do a Christmas record. We can talk about that a little bit, if you like, later on. But I wrote that song actually about two days after the idea was put to me.”

— Nick Lowe

43. “A devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth.”

— Nick Lowe

44. “I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.”

— Nick Lowe

45. “I felt that in order to do what I wanted to do, I had to do certain things, and one of them was to have a hit in my own right. At least one.”

— Nick Lowe

46. “There’s really never any sort of master plan. I find if I’ve got a couple of tunes that I think are possibilities, I phone everyone up and get them into the studio and we’ll have a go at recording them.”

— Nick Lowe

47. “But anyway, I was convinced that it would go away, you know. But the idea was that he was sitting on a flight – you know, one of those sort of fairly long flights, like, sort of, you know, Newark to Denver or something like that – so, you know, a few hours.”

— Nick Lowe

48. “Even if I was really prolific – which I’m not – I think I’d always put at least a couple of covers on my record. I think it’s a sort of healthy thing to do. It shows that you’re not totally self-obsessed.”

— Nick Lowe

49. “I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you’re young, it’s hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.”

— Nick Lowe

50. “When somebody like Elvis Costello comes along, anybody can make a good record with him.”

— Nick Lowe