Jack White Quotes

1. I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan.


2. When I say nothing, I say everything.

3. No matter how much I try to write a song about characters and the interactions they're having, no matter what I do, I can never make it not come from my own experiences. As an artist you're a victim of your environment. I'd like to make up a scenario, but my writing ends up having a lot to do with with things I've felt and observed.

4. I love him (Josh Homme) too much, and you can't hurt someone that you love that much...unless you're family. 

5. (on growing up in Detroit) I think you learn how to walk down the street in a certain way. I think you just learn to have a way about yourself, a style of walking down the street, that keeps people away from you.

6. We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

7. We live in an age where everyone wants a heartfelt story from the singer - where "I" means him - and I never saw it that way. It's as ridiculous as saying Michael Corleone is Francis Ford Coppola. People have become too obsessed with the idea that all songs should be written from the heart. I find that complete strangers have no right to be part of my private life. I would never give that to them.

8. I really don't like to take the easy way out, if I can help it, on anything I do, I like to really make it a challenge. I don't know how to create by taking the easy routes. I've tried, you know, I've tried to let myself, but I always struggle to compensate.

9. Well, I sort of don't trust anybody who doesn't like Led Zeppelin.









10. My mother's the youngest of 10 children too, so we have sort of a special bond in that we know what that feels like. It's a strange spot to be in.

11. Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Auto-tuning doesn't do anything for creativity. Yeah, it makes it easier and you can get home sooner; but it doesn't make you a more creative person. That's the disease we have to fight in any creative field: ease of use.

12. The auctioneer is talking for both people, and that's the big revelation about: "Oh, that's what they're doing." They're just doing it very fast, so you could kind of miss on that. He's speaking for you, because people in the crowd don't have a voice, so that's what really makes it compelling.




13. I think the sensitivity that you need to create certain things sometimes would spill over into things that shouldn't have bothered me.

14. It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved. 

15. For new bands, I think a major label is the safest place to be. Independent labels are the ones getting away with murder. A lot of them are hobbyists who rip-off young bands, taking advantage of people who would never get signed to a major.


16. There aren't that many things left that haven't already been done, especially with music. I'm interested in ideas that can shake us all up.

17. Every time there's a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days. Hardly any of them took a year, I'll tell you. In this day and age, I think it's important that people know that.

 
18. It seemed like there was no control over it. I think certain things just popped. God was blessing us in telling us that certain things were going the way they were supposed to go. 

19. I've had a great day today. I flew for thirteen hours and I somehow didn't watch t.v. the whole time. I didn't notice until I was off the plane. I wonder what I was thinking about. I'm one of those people that you have to keep your eye on or I'll wander off into the woods and forget to come back.


20. I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I'm not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don't want to come off egotistical.

21. Music is what I have to do, I only answer the questions so that I can do it.

22. It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.


23. I'd got accepted to the seminary in Wisconsin, and I was gonna become a priest, but the last second I thought: "I'll just go to public school." I had just gotten a new amplifier in my bedroom, and I didn't think I was allowed to take it with me. 

24. Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most.

25. People aren't buying records like they used to, so it's nice to try to figure out a way to make them do it. I would enjoy the same thing to own an old movie house, to try to trick people to come in - like having 3-D or Smell-o-Vision or Vibra-Vision or something. Mcguffins to get people interested.






26. I would never purposely sing a song about someone I love, I wouldn't want to embarrass them. But for someone I don't like…I would definitely do that.

27. Some people remaster their records six, seven times, remix it three, four times, spend a million hours, then they always go back and hear a demo of it and they'll say: "Aw that sounds so much better than the final mix."

28. An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.

29. I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn't go on stage in jeans and a T shirt you weren't "real." That seemed ridiculous to me.

30. There's Catholic guilt about things, then there's the guilt of being the youngest of 10, so when nice things happen to you, you're not really allowed to enjoy them.

31. I didn't really even think of recording under my own name for a long time. I thought: "I've got the rest of my life to do that."

32. I won't join another band again.

33. I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played "Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits" - in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.







34. The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

35. I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say: "Yeah, I know what you mean," and stare at their mobiles.

36. My mother was 45 when she had me, so when I was in high school my parents were the same age as my friends' grandparents.

37. I think you can't really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child, whether it's New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can't escape it, even if you completely disagree with it, you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.

38. Nowadays, everybody assumes, when they wake up in the morning, if they have a question, it will get answered. Because they have the internet. No matter what the question is, someone will answer their question.

39. I think that sometimes love gets in the way of itself - you know, love interrupts itself. We want things so much that we sabotage them.

40. The way I like to start a new project is to take a cover song and make a stab at it, ideally one that has nothing to do with the people in the room.

41. Frank Sinatra was dignified. We don't have a Frank Sinatra, or a Patti Page nowadays. What do we have? Ashlee Simpson instead of Patti Page! I mean, look at those people - like Paris Hilton! Who are all these skanks, man? Little girls are looking up to these girls, and it's so gross. Those girls have no dignity at all, and parents are letting their kids dress up like those skanks. But what else have they got? What are the other choices? Somebody had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to play guitar on Lindsay Lohan's album! She's another one of those 16-year-old actresses, and she's making an album! Like: "NO!" Ha ha ha! 

42. I keep guitars that are, you know, the neck's a little bit bent and it's a little bit out of tune. I want to work and battle it and conquer it and make it express whatever attitude I have at that moment. I want it to be a struggle.



43. I certainly wouldn't want a song that I'd already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange.

44. With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realizing we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black.

45. I have so much music inside me I'm just trying to stay afloat. I don't tend to write for a particular band - you have to just write the songs and then let God into the room and let the music tell you what to do.

46. Playing drums feels like coming home for me. Even during the White Stripes I thought: "I'll do this for now, but I'm really a drummer." That's what I'll put on my passport application.

47. This generation is so dead. You ask a kid: "What are you doing this Saturday?" and they'll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say: "Man, I'm really into remote-controlled steamboats."

48. A lot of people in the media, and some everyday people, really aren't in search of the truth. They're in search of something worse than that. Money, yeah. I think the media's the kind of a thing where the truth doesn't win, because it's no fun. The truth's no fun.

49. I know that's blasphemous when you are from Detroit, but I was never a fan of Motown stuff. I don't care for the production much.

50. Well, as a songwriter, it's really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It's a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it's the most popular topic to ever write about.

51. I'd make a White Stripes record right now. I'd be in the White Stripes for the rest of my life. That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. I wish it was still here. It's something I really, really miss.

52. I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

53. We have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.

54. I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm.

55. When you put something out there into the world, there's all these words you don't want to hear, that you hope people don't say. I don't like anything that starts with "re" - like retro, reinvent, recreate - I hate that. It's always like living in the past - copying, emulating.

56. I've always felt it's ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You're my friend, you're my wife, you're my girlfriend, you're my co-worker. This is your box, and you're not allowed to stray outside of it.


57. If you have twenty guys in the room and you just bring in one girl, you change the entire mood and everyone plays different.

58. I've always loved the word blunderbuss. I've always thought that it was a beautiful word and that it could mean several different things.

59. Vinyl is the real deal. I've always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don't really own the album. And it's not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.

60. The Guinness book is a very elitist organization. There's nothing scientific about what they do. They just have an office full of people who decide what is a record and what isn't.

61. I wanted to be able to talk with people who have trade jobs and make records with them. I want to do more records with carpenters, electricians, people who specialize in even more bizarre trades that are off the beaten path.

62. If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.

63. I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don't know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.

64. That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the: "Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out" - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

65. I just think old old movies, they make you concentrate and pay attention so much more. They feel so warm. A lot of modern digital videotape, it's just too bright. Don't know why, it's not warm.


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