Explore Quotes by Robert Smith

For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.

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.

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.

Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.

Apart from the fact that I've got a strange job, I do lead a fairly normal life. I do my own shopping. I don't feel constrained by who I am because of what I do; I often feel disappointed by my lack of ability. I get frustrated at myself, but I think everyone does.

I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with and where I am. Having said that, I'm not really a person of habit, because what I do in my job is travel around the world and play concerts to people, and occasionally do very weird things.

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 never answer if someone knocks on my door and only the band and my manager have my phone number. In any case my phone doesn't ring so I never notice it. I occasionally just walk past and pick it up to see if anyone's there.

Whenever I'm home, I haven't got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.

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

You can't drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage... well you can, but then you're Spandau Ballet.

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

There's no hope of me becoming completely relaxed on stage. If I did, I'd sit down and doze off.

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

Nobody notices me. Nobody thinks I'm me. But then I look less like me than most of the people coming to our concerts.

I still frequent my parents' house. I go there to escape, back to the bedroom that I grew up in. Just to sit there and feel small.

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

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

I've discovered special makeup by a company called M.A.C. You could wear it on the surface of the sun and it wouldn't move.

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

I write with a pen and paper. Never on a laptop.