Quotes from Joe Strummer

I don't want to look back. I want to keep going forward, I still have something to say to people.

What I like about playing America is you can be pretty sure you're not going to get hit with a full can of beer when you're singing and I really enjoy that!

To me our music is like Jamaican stuff - if they can't hear it, they're not supposed to hear it. It's not for them if they can't understand it.

I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't.

There isn't a town in the world I haven't run amok in.

All the power's in the hands of people rich enough to buy it.

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.

When we played Paris, the English punks would come over, and they got to know the French punks. There was some nice scenes in the back alleys.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

I get on all right with my parents. But I don't see them very much. They split up when I was eight. I stayed with my mum, but I felt it was a bit soft with her. I could do whatever I liked, and I wasn't getting nowhere, so I went to stay with my dad.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn't looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world.

The hippy movement was a failure.

With The Simpsons you can go back to work with a keen heart.

I think we're going to have to forget about the radio and just go back to word of mouth.

A lot of the time I'm semi-insane, but there is a slight bit of intelligence there.

There is a time to dance to techno and a time not to.

I'm proud of all our records. Even the crap ones.

I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.

We're all going to have to learn to live together and develop a greater tolerance and get rid off whatever our fathers gave us in the way of hatred between nations.

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.

You can only follow what's on your mind. In fact, a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it.

You don't write on tour; it takes all your concentrating to make the gig - that's survival technique. Afterwards, you run around town to find interesting hipsters and go to all the interesting spots. You got to go to every hotspot until everything has closed down.

Punk rock isn't something you grow out of Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is 'give us some truth'