Lou Reed Quotes

I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.

It's just a temporary thing.

I think life is far too short to concentrate on your past. I rather look into the future.

When the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic that lets you survive your own war, you'll find that that fire is passion and there's a door up ahead - not a wall.

First thing you learnis that you'vealways got to wait

I can't do anything I want to. I mean, I can't have my own TV show. I can't have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums.

Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.

They tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim, they put blood in his coffee and milk in his gin.

I don't think I'm in any position to call myself a martial artist. I'm a student of the martial arts.

The baby sits in front of MTV watching violent fantasies, while Dad guzzles beer with his favorite sport only to find his heroes all coked up.

Some even claim that I'm a terror, a dictator and they're right.

I always thought martial arts was the most modern choreography we could have right now, and I always wanted to put it to music.

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

Sound is more than just noise. Ordered sound is music. My life is music.

Some people drink to unleash their libidos, and other people drink to prop up their egos.

And no kinds of love are better than others

When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside your twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands cause I see you. I'll be you mirror.

In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle.

I cleaned up my act because otherwise I would have kicked the bucket.

It's depressing when you're still around and your albums are out of print.

The music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music?

I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage.

All the people have gone to war leaving no interrogator to mind.

I have no control over the audience. I have no idea what they think. My heart's pure. I can't do anything. I really can't do anything. I don't know what goes on in the crowd.

I shot a vein in my neck and coughed up a quaalude.

The heart says what only the heart knows.

Valium would have helped that bash.

I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running.

Music was what bothered me, what interested me.

Dear Pope, send me some hope or a rope.

Electricity comes from other planets.

I had started also studying because I wanted to learn more about power and fighting.

I don't know anyone actually who does care what a critic says.

High energy does not necessarily mean fast, high energy has to do with heart.

When I saw that combination of grace and power, the fast and the soft, the yin and the yang, that's what I'd been looking for.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all.

I don't mind a repetitive chorus; I mind repetitive verse. I mean, it's the same amount of space. Why would you have only three diamonds if you can have six?

You won't see my parents honored on any stamps.

With Master Ren, if I'd tell him I can't do that and he'd say, yes you can, and it turns out I very much can do it.

You're a musician: You play. That's what you do.

I don't really think about what the subject of my next album will be. I just know that I'm going to make another album.

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

I'd harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.

To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do.

When you pass through the fire, you pass through humble.

Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.

I think it's important that people don't feel alone.

One of my rules is: Never listen to your old stuff.

I'd breed a little liberal army in the wood, just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar with their tribe of mutant inbred piglets.

Research, research, research. It means everything.