Quotes from Thom Yorke

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.

I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were.

If I could be any famous person, I'd be John Wilkes Booth, because I'd love to shoot Abraham Lincoln in the face

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.

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.

Drying up in conversation You will be the one who cannot talk All your insides fall to pieces You just sit there wishing you could still make love.

I went to a boys' school, and I didn't realize that most guys join bands because they wanted to get girls. I was not really focused on that the way everybody else was.

People are born with certain faces, like my father was born with a face that people want to hit.

Immerse your soul in love.

They love me like I was a brother They protect me, listen to me They dug me my very own garden Gave me sunshine, made me happy Nice dream, nice dream Nice dream

At home I've got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour.

Our merchandised may be over priced, but I think it's reasonable considering I only want more money.

Do not tell me what I can and cannot do. I'll be as asian as I want to (Stretches his eyes in a racist manner).

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.

Being in a band turns you into a child and keeps you there.

Look at that fat kid, in the audience. You want some pie you little fatty? I strongly dislike fat kids. Security, please remove him, that fat kid, over there, by the pies.

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.

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.

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.

Sonic the hedgehog is a beautiful statement on capitalism. You spend your whole life collecting yellow rings and then hit one spike and lose them all. And there is a fat man who wants to kill you.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world.

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.

At home I've got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour.