Pete Townshend

“I want to age with some dignity.”

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

“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.”

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

“When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.”

“Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.”

“What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“It's sad when people break up.”