Top 30 Jack White Quotes

It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.

I certainly wouldn’t want a song that I’d already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange.

I wanted to be able to talk with people who have trade jobs and make records with them. I want to do more records with carpenters, electricians, people who specialize in even more bizarre trades that are off the beaten path.

There aren’t that many things left that haven’t already been done, especially with music. I’m interested in ideas that can shake us all up.

I’ve always loved the word blunderbuss. I’ve always thought that it was a beautiful word and that it could mean several different things.

I keep guitars that are, you know, the neck’s a little bit bent and it’s a little bit out of tune. I want to work and battle it and conquer it and make it express whatever attitude I have at that moment. I want it to be a struggle.

I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you’re left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you’re just left with rhythm.

Well, as a songwriter, it’s really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It’s a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it’s the most popular topic to ever write about.

I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time. I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’

Nowadays, everybody assumes, when they wake up in the morning, if they have a question, it will get answered. Because they have the internet. No matter what the question is, someone will answer their question.

I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played ‘Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits’ – in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.

The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

I just think old old movies, they make you concentrate and pay attention so much more. They feel so warm. A lot of modern digital videotape, it’s just too bright. Don’t know why, it’s not warm.

I know that’s blasphemous when you are from Detroit, but I was never a fan of Motown stuff. I don’t care for the production much.

A lot of people in the media, and some everyday people, really aren’t in search of the truth. They’re in search of something worse than that. Money, yeah. I think the media’s the kind of a thing where the truth doesn’t win, because it’s no fun. The truth’s no fun.

I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ and stare at their mobiles.

I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn’t go on stage in jeans and a T shirt you weren’t ‘real.’ That seemed ridiculous to me.

I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don’t know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.

We have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.

Playing drums feels like coming home for me. Even during the White Stripes I thought: ‘I’ll do this for now, but I’m really a drummer.’ That’s what I’ll put on my passport application.

If you have twenty guys in the room and you just bring in one girl, you change the entire mood and everyone plays different.

I think that sometimes love gets in the way of itself – you know, love interrupts itself. We want things so much that we sabotage them.

I dabbled in things like Howlin’ Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I’d been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

I really don’t like to take the easy way out, if I can help it, on anything I do, I like to really make it a challenge. I don’t know how to create by taking the easy routes. I’ve tried, you know, I’ve tried to let myself, but I always struggle to compensate.

I won’t join another band again.

I think the sensitivity that you need to create certain things sometimes would spill over into things that shouldn’t have bothered me.

For new bands, I think a major label is the safest place to be. Independent labels are the ones getting away with murder. A lot of them are hobbyists who rip-off young bands, taking advantage of people who would never get signed to a major.

If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.