Robert Smith Quotes

Quotes by and about Robert Smith

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Smith: "I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else. Living, it's awful for me. I can't on one hand argue the futility of life and the pointlessness of existence and have a family. It doesn't sit comfortably. ... I enjoy myself hugely, but you know, it's despite myself, really."

Smith: "Sometimes there are days where I refuse to do my duties. ... But then again there is a thread running through The Cure that's all about escapism."

Smith: "Most people feel so conditioned, so oppressed by everything that goes on around them that they just give in. You have to refuse to give in."

Smith: "I lose myself in music because I can't be bothered explaining what I feel to anyone else around me."

Smith: "People think it's funny that I enjoy dreaming so much. I just use it as a form of entertainment. It's very private. I don't see my dreams as separate. I mean, half the time I'm wandering around dreaming anyway."

Smith: "Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it."

Smith: "[The first important book in my life was] 'Narnia chronicles' by C.S. Lewis. ... I adored running away in those tales, it was my only reassuring moment: I was just discovering the incredible power of literature, the one of consolation and evasion."

Smith: "[Camus's] 'The Stranger' is an important book to me."

Smith: "Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free. ... Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist."

Smith: "I never liked U2, the things they've done over the years. Bono's so totally absorbed in the idea of himself as almost messianic."

Smith: "I have never liked Morrissey and I still don't. I think it's hilarious, actually, what things I've heard about him, what he's really like, and his public persona is so different. He's such an actor. There's one particular photo of Morrissey in his swimming trunks sitting by the pool in Los Angeles. I bet that one hasn't been approved!"

Smith: "[Hit] charts are a reflection of general taste and I think the general taste is usually pretty vile."

Smith: "I have 25 nephews and nieces and they seem to consider me of indeterminate age. They don't quite know if I'm one of them, an adult or this third kind of person."

The Guardian: "Like a pan-sticked Peter Pan, there is something eternally teenage about Robert Smith. He is an excellent interviewee: forthcoming, erudite - even slightly mischievous. Any such levity, however, is leavened by the tacit acknowledgment that existence is futile, and we are all just bags of flesh and bones whiling away the days before death and putrefaction sets in."

Tim Burton: "A long time ago when I was an animator at Disney chained to a desk having to draw cute talking animals, I was fucking depressed and [The Cure's] music was the only thing that really saved me. I mean if it can make a manic depressive happy, they did it. ... They just spoke to anyone who felt strange and weird."