Quotes from Robert Smith

It's only people that aren't goths that think the Cure are a goth band.

I don't find the technology threatening. A lot of people my age, my generation, find it difficult to immerse themselves. But I would never preclude the idea of using any technology if I thought it suited the end result.

But everyone I know reaches a point where they throw out their arms and go beserk for a while; otherwise you never know what your limits are. I was just trying to find mine.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

When you're on stage, the real world just drops away for that time. It's pretty intense.

I started out in the 'Cure' reflecting things that I thought were important, and it's reached a point where it takes over and becomes the thing that is important.

The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.

I think that if you become a parent, you stop being a child, and your position in relation to your parents changes.

I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.

Sometimes I'll get to the end of a song, open my eyes and there's all these faces peering at me. It's quite horrifying.

I wouldn't want to think people doted on us, hung on every word, or wanted to look like us.

Reading is something I've really missed, not being able to enter people's worlds.

Perhaps not as badly applied and not as obvious, but for thousands of years, people have worn makeup on stage.

I'm not going to worry about the Cure slipping down into the second division; it doesn't bother me because I never expected to be in the first division anyway.

Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

I'd like to record somewhere really different. Rent a really big house and get a mobile in and set up in the dining room. Maybe New England; it'd be nice in September or October.

Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it.

Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.

I despise people who revel in the ignorance of not being able to play their instrument.

I honestly don't class myself as a songwriter. I've got 'musician' written on my passport. That's even funnier.

When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.

Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free, and when you're nine or 10, your life is entirely dominated by adults. So he represented this thing that I wanted to be. Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist - before that I wanted to be a footballer.

I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.