A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.
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

Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.
Pete Townshend

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

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

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

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

He is the king. If it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar.
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 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

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.
Pete Townshend

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

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

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.
Pete Townshend

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.
Pete Townshend

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

It's like the mod thing is happening again.
Pete Townshend

Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.
Pete Townshend

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

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