Top 100 Pete Townshend Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I respect those who follow religious routes only if they seem to me to be morally proper and in accord with the modern world.”

— Pete Townshend

52. “I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called ‘rock and roll.’”

— Pete Townshend

53. “The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.”

— Pete Townshend

54. “Looking back, I don’t know why we needed it to be quite so loud all the time.”

— Pete Townshend

55. “I want to get inside your bitter mind and see what I can find.”

— Pete Townshend

56. “I see a boy with his mother’s ambition, performing for love, trained in submission.”

— Pete Townshend

57. “Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.”

— Pete Townshend

58. “I’ve learned a huge amount because I’ve been tested and, more importantly, I’ve been trusted.”

— Pete Townshend

59. “I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.”

— Pete Townshend

60. “It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.”

— Pete Townshend

61. “It’s terrible feeling like an eligible bachelor but no women seeming to agree with you.”

— Pete Townshend

62. “Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.”

— Pete Townshend

63. “I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I’m more disciplined today.”

— Pete Townshend

64. “The Who is now a brand, not a band; but it is a brand that is upheld by its audience, not an industry or a cynical moneymaking machine.”

— Pete Townshend

65. “Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.”

— Pete Townshend

66. “I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.”

— Pete Townshend

67. “Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll.”

— Pete Townshend

68. “If you don’t want anyone to know anything about you, don’t write anything.”

— Pete Townshend

69. “I don’t really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue.”

— Pete Townshend

70. “Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.”

— Pete Townshend

71. “Turning something into low resolution data does seem to make it worth less in the modern world.”

— Pete Townshend

72. “Water is more precious than oil. Both are more precious than music. Music won’t heat a house or help a plant to grow.”

— Pete Townshend

73. “If I were to have my own brand of guitars, they would have to be industructable.”

— Pete Townshend

74. “It’s an ordinary day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.”

— Pete Townshend

75. “The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.”

— Pete Townshend

76. “I want to age with some dignity.”

— Pete Townshend

77. “It’s the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.”

— Pete Townshend

78. “Everything that has befallen you happened simply cause it crossed your mind.”

— Pete Townshend

79. “What the Who is all about is exactly that and it always has been. If it exists today for this concert, it’s in response again to a function which is happening out there on the street.”

— Pete Townshend

80. “Like so many addicts, I’d thought that if I could only sort out my life, I could then sort out my drinking. It was a revelation to see that it would be simpler the other way around.”

— Pete Townshend

81. “Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood.”

— Pete Townshend

82. “What the English like to do is to face reality with a glass of port and a tear and fade off like Basil Rathbone into the sunset.”

— Pete Townshend

83. “I also had the ability to create alpha-state music in my head, go into a creative trance, have musical visions, and.”

— Pete Townshend

84. “What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story.”

— Pete Townshend

85. “I’m only interested in rites of passage stories.”

— Pete Townshend

86. “Any fool can hide, few can play.”

— Pete Townshend

87. “I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine.”

— Pete Townshend

88. “Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.”

— Pete Townshend

89. “What I’m trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It’s my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it’s very much alive.”

— Pete Townshend

90. “Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.”

— Pete Townshend

91. “The music we play has to be tomorrow’s, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.”

— Pete Townshend

92. “Bob Dylan did the first really long record – Like A Rolling Stone – I think it was four minutes.”

— Pete Townshend

93. “I think we are incumbent, I am incumbent, the Who is incumbent, anybody that produces anything by me is incumbent by my Englishness.”

— Pete Townshend

94. “Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I’d forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.”

— Pete Townshend

95. “The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I’m not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.”

— Pete Townshend

96. “Keith Moon is not interested in Jazz and won’t ever be a Jazz drummer because he’s more interested in looking good and being screamed at.”

— Pete Townshend

97. “I just could not believe that 30 years later we’re still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that’s a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.”

— Pete Townshend

98. “It wasn’t just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.”

— Pete Townshend

99. “I was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They’re less scary when they aren’t going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I.”

— Pete Townshend

100. “But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol’s work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell’s soup can.”

— Pete Townshend