Top 250 Thom Yorke Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “We weren’t listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.”

— Thom Yorke

202. “There was a clown that tried to eat me as a boy, in my nightmares. Years later I found a clown for booking online who resembled him named Patches. Needless to say, Patches is dead now.”

— Thom Yorke

203. “Cigarrettes make you look cool.”

— Thom Yorke

204. “I’m actually an athiest. That’s kind of deep you must admit.”

— Thom Yorke

205. “When even your fans are writing to tell you to get a life, you know you need to listen.”

— Thom Yorke

206. “I’m even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american.”

— Thom Yorke

207. “The only real difference between me and chocolate pudding is that I am not a black man.”

— Thom Yorke

208. “If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels – right-wing-biased mothers.”

— Thom Yorke

209. “Making music for Radiohead is like going to the bathroom, I’m just going to the bathroom constantly, and millions are watching me go to the bathroom.”

— Thom Yorke

210. “If you’re bored of the songs, you’re bored of the songs. There’s not much you can do.”

— Thom Yorke

211. “In America, there seems to be more focus on the idea that it’s important to do things differently. In Britain, it’s not an issue.”

— Thom Yorke

212. “I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they’re trying to write about. They have music.”

— Thom Yorke

213. “I bought a blimp just so I could get a bunch of wankers excited over nothing, what did you do with your weekend?”

— Thom Yorke

214. “The society, is, a dishwasher, where all the water, is, dead chipmunk blood. God I’m brilliant.”

— Thom Yorke

215. “I think a lot of tunes can suffer from being so simple, so either they get over-complicated or their simplicity means the simple way to lay them down becomes the difficulty.”

— Thom Yorke

216. “There are a lot of things I cannot do, such as eat books and read chicken.”

— Thom Yorke

217. “If Radiohead were a fruit we would be apples, because apples are festive.”

— Thom Yorke

218. “I guess I am narcisstic, but only in the sense that I am brilliant and tortured as well.”

— Thom Yorke

219. “It will be only a matter of time before the music business establishment completely folds.”

— Thom Yorke

220. “It’s God’s will that millions of people are gonna die this year because of some outmoded economic policies? No, it’s not!”

— Thom Yorke

221. “I didn’t ask to be Thom Yorke. Thom Yorke asked to be me.”

— Thom Yorke

222. “If the media spotlight affects my work or represses what I want to say in the future, then it is bad.”

— Thom Yorke

223. “Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what’s going on around them, it makes them think.”

— Thom Yorke

224. “Someone once asked me how the universe was created, I told him it all began with Pablo Honey.”

— Thom Yorke

225. “When you’re a parent, then you still have to commit to this concept of, “Okay, I’m basically out of action now for three months.””

— Thom Yorke

226. “Where are you sleeping tonight? Face down in the mud? That’s a British tradition: Take acid and fall asleep in some field.”

— Thom Yorke

227. “I’m horrified of leprechauns. I’m horrified that I might be leprechauns.”

— Thom Yorke

228. “Remember that Cosby show where he harrassed the children? Well I put on a little suit and because I am so small they invited me on but nobody was laughing at my jokes. I guess I’m just, too, particularly smart for them.”

— Thom Yorke

229. “It’s maybe a good thing to try to make music that feels reassuring in some ways – something that’s got a good feeling, a good vibe about it.”

— Thom Yorke

230. “I don’t know why people called me Tom. My name is THUMB.”

— Thom Yorke

231. “I may have found the cure for cancer, and I think it might be Thom Yorke Serum.”

— Thom Yorke

232. “I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different.”

— Thom Yorke

233. “And the moral of the story is I’m Thom Yorke.”

— Thom Yorke

234. “My argument would be that I don’t think there is much that’s genuinely political art that is good art.”

— Thom Yorke

235. “Well, I’ve been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there’s no hope.”

— Thom Yorke

236. “I think sometimes all the charities are doing is mopping up the blood. It’s a shame.”

— Thom Yorke

237. “I’m terrible at jigsaw puzzles. Other people solve the puzzle but I just keep trying to make the pieces that don’t fit fit. I guess that’s what makes me special, I try to assemble jigsaw puzzles incorrectly.”

— Thom Yorke

238. “I’d like to run for president. Or Prime Minister. I think I could do a better job.”

— Thom Yorke

239. “I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless.”

— Thom Yorke

240. “Thom Yorke has a beautiful brain.”

— Thom Yorke

241. “I think we’re entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it’s in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.”

— Thom Yorke

242. “And then computers got to a point where you could just record directly into them. So when that happened, funny enough, I thought, Right, I’m going to learn how to do this because then I can understand that part.”

— Thom Yorke

243. “Our merchandised may be over priced, but I think it’s reasonable considering I only want more money.”

— Thom Yorke

244. “One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.”

— Thom Yorke

245. “I think maybe since there isn’t a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don’t understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.”

— Thom Yorke

246. “Is Thom Yorke there? Oh he is? Well then how the can I be Thom Yorke, talking to you, right here, on the phone.”

— Thom Yorke

247. “Obviously, the duty of artists is there, but it’s more an indictment of the political system that someone like Zinn views artists as the seers, idealizing them as the people responsible for inspiring change.”

— Thom Yorke

248. “I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I’d be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.”

— Thom Yorke

249. “If you don’t trust everybody on stage with you, then you’re in trouble.”

— Thom Yorke

250. “Well, it only dawned on me about six months ago that not everybody’s against me all the time. It was something of a revelation.”

— Thom Yorke