Pete Townshend Quotes

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Pete Townshend

Profession : Musician

Birth : May 19, 1945

I needed to give back, give back, give back. I felt guilty about my success. I felt uncomfortable about how easily I had been delivered this extraordinary life that I had.

Pete Townshend

It's sad when people break up.

Pete Townshend

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

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

Pete Townshend

I've learned a huge amount because I've been tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted.

Pete Townshend

Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions.

Pete Townshend

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.

Pete Townshend

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

The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter.

Pete Townshend

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

Pete Townshend

I want to age with some dignity.

Pete Townshend

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high you'd laugh and say nothing that simple, but you've been told many times before messiah's point you to the door though no one's got the guts to leave the temple.

Pete Townshend

It's like the mod thing is happening again.

Pete Townshend

A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

Pete Townshend

I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.

Pete Townshend

My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.

Pete Townshend

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

Pete Townshend

I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique.

Pete Townshend

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.

Pete Townshend

For a while I was perfectly happy not performing with 'The Who.' From 1982 to 1989 I felt 'The Who' did not exist. I let the band go, in my heart. However, Roger Daltrey had other ideas. He would not let go.

Pete Townshend