Thom Yorke

We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.

I'm achingly aware of my own limitations as both part of the human race and as an individual. I'm just, casting this out that, maybe, I'm not so perfect as is the affront I oft put on. After all, the lyric is 'I wish I was special'. I truly just want to be loved and accepted, I think, like all humans.

There's a pervading sense of loneliness I've had since the day I was born. Maybe a lot of other people feel the same way, but I'm not about to run up and down the street asking everybody if they're as lonely as I am. I'd probably get locked up.

People in bands don't have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.

I don't think young people are as demoralized as the media and government would like us to think. The obvious sign of that is how strong and how close personal connections are and how much people are able to build a life for themselves, despite all this stuff that's been thrown at them.

I tell you what's really ridiculous--going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.

We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.

All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve - Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end.

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