John Cooper Clarke Quotes

The music of your youth stays with you throughout your life.

A long long time ago, I can still remember how that music use to make me smile.

Anyone who grew up with me knows that Queen is my favorite band of all time.

I can still remember the first time I heard Tori Amos. It was the fall of 1993, and I was in the back of a colossal '79 Lincoln Coupe Mark V, embarking on some otherwise forgettable road trip somewhere in the Deep South.

I had 8-tracks when I was a kid.

I was the singing boy in school.

Songs, to me, have always been kind of like a diary, you know - and, say, when I did 'Teenager In Love,' maybe I was 16.

When I was little, I would sing all around the house.

John Bonham was a good friend of mine. I knew him a bit as a kid. I hung out with him quite a lot.

I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.

Free - I miss that band, but when I look back, we were very young.

I was two years old when I saw the mandolin for the first time, and I just loved it. I just loved the sound of it, the shape of it even, and the way it looks. And I still love it, which is a testament to something.

I feel like, when we are young, especially, while we are experiencing so many 'firsts,' when songs move us, we recall exactly where we were when we heard them.

'Uprising' was one of the first three or four albums I ever bought in 1980 when I was 13, and that had a strong impact on me.

Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

He who sings the praises of his boyhood's days.

It is well known that the older a man grows, the faster he could run as a boy.

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.

That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me ‘Baby,’ and it didn't occur to me to mind.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.

I was on the dance floor but I couldn't hear the band.

When I die, sprinkle my ashes over the 80's.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.