Explore Quotes by John Lydon

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

Obama's dense as a doorbell; not much going on up there - it's a wooden top.

For me, the best rock is not what you play - it's what you're not playing.

I could take on England, but I couldn't take on one heroin user.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Love is two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squishy sounds.

It's nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I'm bloody close.

I'm not going to pontificate and tell you to execute your government at dawn, but it wouldn't be a bad idea.

You gotta bear in mind, the youth - and this is just in Britain alone - have nowhere to go in the evenings. They've closed all the social centers. There's not even a patch of grass to kick a ball on.

You need the past as a guideline. The history of music is a good basis, but to escape that stuff, that tortuous rulebook, you have to learn it first. It's kind of like religion - once you've written the Bible, that's it, move on.

You're made to feel ugly, and I made ugly beautiful. Just by sheer persistence. Nobody has the right to say that I am ugly, and I will not be a professional victim, you know. Sorry!

Words cannot express quite a lot of feelings, whereas a noise or tone or drone or sound, an accordion falling down a staircase, can somehow capture an emotion much better.

You have moments of grief in life, and if you can put pen to paper and capture that, that's something wonderful. I can revisit actual songs about past deaths, and I know that emotion is as true now as it was then.

These days young kids don't have any place to form an epic adventure. It's more often in front of the TV screen or a laptop. That's very hard on them. They're being taught daily unsocial skills. Facebook is an unsocial skill. It's so sad.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

The so-called alleged 'art' of the video - well, the video has killed the radio star, but the video star killed the live musician, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

The real color of my hair is mouse. I always want to be ginger, which I was when I was born, or blond, because I live in L.A., and I want to look like I go surfing without any physical effort.

The only good political movement I've seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.

It's volatile, the marriage. Which one isn't? Nothing better than a good, full-on row. Get it all out. Say rude and nasty things. And then be sorry. Genuinely sorry, afterwards.