Joe Strummer

I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't.

You don't write on tour; it takes all your concentrating to make the gig - that's survival technique. Afterwards, you run around town to find interesting hipsters and go to all the interesting spots. You got to go to every hotspot until everything has closed down.

You can only follow what's on your mind. In fact, a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn't looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

When we played Paris, the English punks would come over, and they got to know the French punks. There was some nice scenes in the back alleys.

We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.

I get on all right with my parents. But I don't see them very much. They split up when I was eight. I stayed with my mum, but I felt it was a bit soft with her. I could do whatever I liked, and I wasn't getting nowhere, so I went to stay with my dad.

To me, our music is like Jamaican stuff - if they can't hear it, they're not supposed to hear it. It's not for them if they can't understand it.

I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.

Yeah, all those things, responsibility, pressure. It's a bit stressful. I try and come to terms with it by not thinking about it.

We didn't have any solution to the world's problems. I mean, we were trying to grow up in a socialist way to some future where the world might be less of a miserable place than it is.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

I think we're going to have to forget about the radio and just go back to word of mouth.

The hippy movement was a failure.

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.

We did eight gigs in super-stadiums, all the biggest joints - L.A. Coliseum, Oakland Coliseum, Shea Stadium.

When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don't learn nothing, cause hey, it's not your fault, it's his fault, over there.

If you ain't thinkin' about man and God and law, then you ain't thinkin' about nothin'.

With The Simpsons you can go back to work with a keen heart.

What I like about playing America is you can be pretty sure you're not going to get hit with a full can of beer when you're singing and I really enjoy that!

I'm proud of all our records. Even the crap ones.

I don't want to look back. I want to keep going forward, I still have something to say to people.

Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control. And it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed.

The future is unwritten.