"The lyrics I write are specifically genderless. I
don't want to leave anybody out. Handsome
is a word that people think is applied to males...
but I know lots of handsome women.
After all, there is such a thing as a pretty male."
(Feb 1984)
"I once bought a Manchester United hat, which I think
was 12 shillings, and somebody ran up behind me
and pulled it off and just ran ahead. I thought,
'It's a very cruel world, I'm not prepared for this'.
And I decided to get my revenge on society."
(Feb 1988)
"I have always half expected some fictitious Sun spread
like 'MORRISSEY INJECTS SLEEPING NUN WITH COCAINE!'
but there's really nothing to report,
and I'm half humiliated to have to confess such a thing."
(Feb 1988)
"Before I joined The Smiths I was in a serious medical condition.
The group are like a life support machine to me."
(May 1983)
"I learned that if I ever wanted to be educated I'd have to leave school.
So anything I learned was from outsideof the education system.
The Catholic church has nothing in common with Christianity.
I can remember being at school on a Monday and being asked,
'Did you go to church yesterday?' And if you hadn't
been you literally had your arms twisted off you.
It's, 'We'll sever your head for your own good,
you'll learn my son'."
(June 1985)
"I look around me and... well, I don't want to break
into a Ralph McTell song, but I do feel the light has gone out
and that things just get progressively worse in every way.
I can't think of one thing which improves."
(NME 2/10/88)
"People believe that once you've had a degree of
success you've been given everything you've striven
for and therefore you back off, you're consumed by
luxurious things. I've been successful but I've never
been isolated within that success to the degree where
I've never been affected for the good or for the bad
by success. I am still quite critically, unbudgeably
the same person. I've never quite believed in it, not
because I don't believe that everything I've done has
been done with taste, because I know the world we live
in and I know how simple and intolerant it is. The
music industry is obviously excessively intolerant of
me as a living, breathing, sleeping, walking person."
(ibid.)
"It would seem almost impossible, I think, at the
height of his fame that he would end a few years later
in such a bitter, ruinous state, such a lonely state,
and also have such a hideous death. A remarkably sad
end when you consider that this man had changed
English literature and English language. Also,
regardless of how he wrote and how he lived in the
public sense, his private life was just as astounding.
And that's the final judgement of all artists... I
don't think it's enough to switch on and switch off
to be there in the daytime but to be playing hockey at
night. I've read practically everything (by and about
him) and I have a vast collection of first editions,
one signed by Ellen Terry, an old chick of Oscar's...
Although he was the most intelligent he simplified
everything, therefore practically anybody could read
Oscar Wilde and understand. He wasn't complicated yet
he still left you lying on the bed panting because it
was so real and truthful."
(ibid.)
"I'm bereft of spiritual solutions. I do believe that
there has to be a better world, but that's rather
simple. I'm quite obsessed with death. I've gone
through periods of intense envy for people who've
died. Yes, I have a dramatic unswayable unavoidable
obsession with death. I can remember being obsessed
with it from the age of eight and I often wondered
whether it was quite a natural inbuilt emotion for
people who're destined to take their own lives, that
they recognise it and begin to study it. If there was
a magical beautiful pill that one could take that
would retire you from this world, I think I would take
it and I suppose that's the extremity of the
obsessiveness."
(ibid.)
"I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me
consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all.
If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't
shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists
just don't do that sort of thing."
(ibid.)
"I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke."
(June 1986)
"I do think it's actually possible to go through life
and never fall in love or find someone who loves you."
(June 1985)
