Top 250 Thom Yorke Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 6

151. “I once wrote a song so beautiful that I myself couldn’t sing it. It’s called Plastic Government Cheese Swan, and it’s about how the world is plastic and full of government cheese swans.”

— Thom Yorke

152. “Being in a band turns you into a child and keeps you there.”

— Thom Yorke

153. “Anybody can make ‘good’ music. I make terrible music, which is what makes it so different, and therefore better.”

— Thom Yorke

154. “One little leak becomes a lake, Says the tiny voice in my earpiece.”

— Thom Yorke

155. “I’ve never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There’s always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.”

— Thom Yorke

156. “I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.”

— Thom Yorke

157. “Someone needs to tell the truth, but it shouldn’t be my job.”

— Thom Yorke

158. “I don’t think young people are as demoralized as the media and government would like us to think. The obvious sign of that is how strong and how close personal connections are and how much people are able to build a life for themselves, despite all this stuff that’s been thrown at them.”

— Thom Yorke

159. “There’s a pervading sense of loneliness I’ve had since the day I was born. Maybe a lot of other people feel the same way, but I’m not about to run up and down the street asking everybody if they’re as lonely as I am. I’d probably get locked up.”

— Thom Yorke

160. “There’s nothing more boring than a rock’n’roll star. Someone who has been on the road for 10 years, expecting attention wherever he goes, drinking himself stupid, who is obnoxious, incoherent, uncreative, and has a massive ego. There’s nothing more pointless.”

— Thom Yorke

161. “There’s an upside to the digital thing from my point of view because I find that I have access to all this wacky, weird-ass dance-music stuff that I just can’t go into a shop and buy on vinyl.”

— Thom Yorke

162. “You know, it’s never easy to understand why I do what I do. For other people, I mean.”

— Thom Yorke

163. “You can’t make an egg without frying an egg.”

— Thom Yorke

164. “I’m baking stories, and singing cookies, oh the tonderous wimes!”

— Thom Yorke

165. “I had a dream where my face was a hamburger. What the?”

— Thom Yorke

166. “The people in charge, globally, are maniacs. They are maniacs, and unless we do something about it these people are going to deprive us of a future.”

— Thom Yorke

167. “Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there’s not enough room for everybody.”

— Thom Yorke

168. “The thing I remember most about America is that it’s silly. That can be quite a relief at times.”

— Thom Yorke

169. “I’m a full grown man and I’m not tall enough to ride a rollercoaster. So I will sit on the teacups, eat my tea and biscuits and reminisce with the cheshire cat who lives in my head. Oh hello Mr. Cheshire, lovely weather this morning. Mr. Cheshire? Oh my god.”

— Thom Yorke

170. “Can you imagine a world in which the letter O does not exist? My name would be Thm Yrke. Think about that.”

— Thom Yorke

171. “I recently enrolled at an elementary school and they accepted me. I am finally going to get revenge on those kids that beat me up as a boy, assuming they are still attending.”

— Thom Yorke

172. “I could not extrapolate some emotion from any song after 1997 so I bought a drum machine and popped pills. The pink ones make me funny like elephants!”

— Thom Yorke

173. “It’s hard being Thom Yorke. You have to get up every morning and look at that face and not shoot at it with a gun.”

— Thom Yorke

174. “I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment – that’s escape.”

— Thom Yorke

175. “So ultimately, it’s idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things.”

— Thom Yorke

176. “I tell you what’s really ridiculous – going into a bookstore and there’s all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you’re already dead.”

— Thom Yorke

177. “We don’t have to stand on a soap-box and preach because hopefully we’re channelling it through the new record.”

— Thom Yorke

178. “I don’t see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.”

— Thom Yorke

179. “I suppose one thing that’s always fascinated me is that thing where you’re a band and you want to start recording and you get a label and a producer, and then there’s that pressure to go out there and really toil.”

— Thom Yorke

180. “Everyone has got the fear It’s holding on Holding on.”

— Thom Yorke

181. “If you want to be entertained, go and see Hanson.”

— Thom Yorke

182. “All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve – Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end.”

— Thom Yorke

183. “At home I’ve got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour.”

— Thom Yorke

184. “What’s the difference between Thom Yorke and a pizza? Pizza’s not as cheesy and delicious as Thom Yorke.”

— Thom Yorke

185. “People are born with certain faces, like my father was born with a face that people want to hit.”

— Thom Yorke

186. “I’m not taking things quite so seriously as before. Especially myself.”

— Thom Yorke

187. “Music is more difficult – try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political.”

— Thom Yorke

188. “I cannot read a fortune cookie without breaking down and crying. I am sensitive.”

— Thom Yorke

189. “Bulletproof is about the fact that I was shot in the face and survived. Nah I’m joking that’d be grisly and awful.”

— Thom Yorke

190. “My heart is a weatherballoon caught in an updraft of a chinese tax percentage, the tax percentages are unequivocaaaaaaaaaal, Unequivocaaaaaaaaal. This is the sort of lyrics you could never think of, loser. Here’s a razorblade go cut yourself.”

— Thom Yorke

191. “I’m banned from Middlebrook elementary for telling dirty jokes to the janitor. The janitor! He cleans up dirt for a living.”

— Thom Yorke

192. “I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness.”

— Thom Yorke

193. “My dad spent his whole life getting into fights for telling what he believed to be the truth. Basically it comes from my dad-and he’s screaming right-wing, so there you are.”

— Thom Yorke

194. “My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that’s just the way it is.”

— Thom Yorke

195. “My name may be Thom Yorke, but only I can call me Thom Yorke.”

— Thom Yorke

196. “This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer’s block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what’s going on has really helped.”

— Thom Yorke

197. “Maybe I’m not the gloaming witches smart, but at least I’m not our stupid liffey hamburger mongrels.”

— Thom Yorke

198. “I’m terrified of lasagna. I think it was to eat ME!”

— Thom Yorke

199. “I often steal sandwiches, eat them, and put the container’s back., with a signed autograph of my self in its place. It’s my way of giving back to society.”

— Thom Yorke

200. “We didn’t start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what’s going on around us.”

— Thom Yorke