I want to be alone and I want people to notice me — both at the same time.
Trying to find my flaws is like trying to find a black person at one of our concerts
I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.
It’s easy to be miserable. Being happy is tougher – and cooler.
People in bands don’t have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.
Sex is more than an act of pleasure, it’s the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.
Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not saying my fans are stupid, but I once left a cabbage onstage next to a harmonica and nobody noticed for three hours
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.
I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that’s unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
