Thom Yorke Quotes

And I know I'm paranoid and neurotic, I've made a career out of it.

Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there's not enough room for everybody.

Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what's going on around them, it makes them think.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

I don't think young people are as demoralized as the media and government would like us to think. The obvious sign of that is how strong and how close personal connections are and how much people are able to build a life for themselves, despite all this stuff that's been thrown at them.

I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.

I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment - that's escape.

I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

I think sometimes all the charities are doing is mopping up the blood. It's a shame.

I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.

I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.

I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.

If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels - right-wing-biased mothers.

If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.

It's God's will that millions of people are gonna die this year because of some outmoded economic policies? No, it's not!

Music is more difficult - try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political.

My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art.

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.

Obviously, the duty of artists is there, but it's more an indictment of the political system that someone like Zinn views artists as the seers, idealizing them as the people responsible for inspiring change.

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.

So ultimately, it's idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things.

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.

The problem is, I cannot meditate. That's the one thing I can't do. That's the thing that's driving me nuts. I have a house by the sea, and I can sit and listen to the sound of the sea and eventually . . . but I can't really do it.

This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped.

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.

We don't have to stand on a soap-box and preach because hopefully we're channelling it through the new record.

Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.

Well, it only dawned on me about six months ago that not everybody's against me all the time. It was something of a revelation.