Peter Hammill Quotations

There's always a Van der Graaf audience that wants to hear the band's sound. And totally fair enough. Why not? It's a band. You like the band, you like the band.

The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.

My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

My dictum has always been: 'This show is happening just here, just tonight, with these people who are in this hall, and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's done.'

To be honest, I don't know really what I do on stage.

It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.

Seriously, these days I tend to shut up in terms of external analysis and DO try to let things speak for themselves, while still trying to get some depth into them.

The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it's true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres.

A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book.

Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.