John Taylor Quotes

1. You know what I always say? Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.


2. I wanna be an air force ranger!

3. Of course we slept with the models in our videos. So did the managers, so did the director. Everybody sleeps with everybody in this game.

4. (on illegal downloading of music) It's never, ever bothered me. I'm a music fan that didn't have a lot of pocket money when he was a kid. I bought what I could afford and taped the rest off radio or made a tape from my friend's copy of the album. I'm not hurting. I don't have an attachment to what I call "delivery systems". We write songs and we perform them live - that's what we do for a living…I think songwriters and performers will survive. They just will. Maybe there is't as much money in the pot as there was in the mid-70s or mid-80s, but the good writers and the good performers will survive.

5. I don't know that we made a lot of mistakes, really.

6. I hated being a teenager, until I discovered just how powerful the world of popular music was. It helped me find an identity and find myself. Not just the notes and beats, but the icons and the haircuts and the clothes and the liner notes. Music saved me in a way, or at least it gave me a sense of direction of how life could be.


7. (on being confessional) I haven't done that sort of thing in many, many years. I don't practice any aspects of Catholicism.

8. The less we talk about the X-Factor, the better.

9. Maybe the tour manager was playing a joke on everybody. I was talking to a photographer friend of mine who was on that tour, and he told me: "I remember one of the pages said: "Don't even think about it.""

10. There were definitely groupies. Plenty of them to go around.

11. (on cocaine) It was never a pre-show ritual. I could never really play well on cocaine. I'm quite particular about that. I would never have taken cocaine before a show. But at one point it started creeping into the encores. That was different. It was like, the work's over and this is the victory lap. Theoretically you can do an encore easily. But it's a slippery slope.

12. The speed and growth of new technology, which has been so heralded and so much fuss has been made of, has actually served to disguise how little real growth is taking place at the artistic level.

13. I don't mean I like wearing women’s clothes, but to me a dress is just a long T-shirt and I like doing things differently with clothes...





14. It was suggested to me that if I wanted to write a book, it was a good time. There was a bit of a gold rush on in the publishing business.

15. Each little relationship, each one night stand, was a serious emotional entanglement. I had to be in the ('90s supergroup) "Neurotic Outsiders" before I saw anybody get head on a tour bus. Duran Duran was never that kind of band. We were all kind of suburban and gentlemanly and it wasn't about numbers.

16. (on Gene Simmons) Gene has got a slightly different story. He's a Holocaust surviver. He's come from a very complex background. And I'm pretty sure he's in an open marriage, or used to be. He very much could be the sort of man who sought out safety in numbers, shall we say. But I'd be surprised if Jagger was. Jagger's had several quite well-balanced relationships. So I'm not quite sure how between Marianne Faithfull, Bianca and Jerry Hall he's managed to fit in another 3997 women.

17. When artists today are asked to twitter their every thought, their every action, to record on video their every breath, their every performance, I believe they're diluting their creative powers, their creative potency and the durability of their work. And in the long run I believe they're also diluting the magical power and the magnetic attraction that they can or will ever have over their audience.

18. I look like a raging queen! 

19. The hardest topic for me to write about was the drug use, and how I was going to create a scene that (conveys a) sense of real desperation to show that I had reached a bottom. I had this night in mind that I remembered very clearly, and I thought: "Imagine if Quentin Tarantino wrote that scene."

20. That’s how me and Nick became friends...we were both into girls’ clothes...

21. (when asked to describe his bandmates) I don't want to do that. I understand why the One Direction kids don't want to be asked that. Finding a word that describes another band member that's not going to upset them? It's impossible. I don't think anybody likes to be defined by one word.

22. The carpet’s the wrong color in the hotel room...so what do you do? You put your fist through a pane of glass. You know...hello!

23. In just a couple of years with Duran Duran, we went from writing songs to writing number one songs. So everything had to be bigger, everything had to be better, everything had to sell more.





24. Warren'’s a muscleman, Andy’'s a drunk..

25. (on drugs and groupies) Well for me, I just didn't have the off switch. Nobody could tell me: "You need to cut down, you need to get an early night tonight, John." I was like: "F*ck you!" I had to keep going until I hit a wall. And I definitely see that with a lot of younger artists. Fame can be very intense.

26. I’'ll give you three excuses to trash a hotel room. One is that construction work is going on and then they didn’'t tell you. Two is that the curtains do not shut completely. And three - because you’'re a star baby!

27. I was so happy when Nick (Rhodes) said to me the other day: "Johnny, I'm not going to read your book." I said: "Nick, I'm so happy about that, because you really don't need to." There's a lot of love for Nick in the book, but he's going to be: "But it wasn't like that," and he's going to get all out of joint about it.

28. (on money and religion) You can't afford to get too individual. You've got to have a band party line. Kids may identify with different members, but you all have to be part of a unit. They're all members of One Direction. Nobody wants to hear that they've got different religious views. It makes them more divisive as a group. Leave religion out of it. It just complicates things. And quite honestly, who knows if they even have their religion sorted out. We would have hated that question back in the '80s. We would have said: "We're not a political band and we're not a religious band." But me as an individual, if you're talking to me personally, I'm happy to answer questions about religion. But if I'm sitting in a room with my bandmates, that's not a direction we want to go.

29. Butter is great but dangerous.

30. For me, Bowie was never gay. He was bi. The '70s were a very bisexual period. A lot of the artists I was into were embracing that lifestyle. It's like "Velvet Goldmine", that kind of thing. I think it was as much a reaction against machismo and identifying strongly as a male. I don't know. I've always liked women's clothing, what can I tell you?



31. We put together so many looks during the '80s, how could some of them not be god awful? But sure, there were a couple of looks I wish we'd never done.

32. I'’m such a momma’s boy. I used to think it was rebellious to throw a towel on the floor.

33. We tried several times to write a band book. I thought it should all be in quotes - like, Simon (LeBon) says one thing, then John. It's really the only way. But I've come to realize it's an impossible task. That's one of the reasons why I decided to take the bull by the horns and write my own. Not only did I feel that it was going to take a long time for us to actually get it together, but I felt it wouldn't be terribly good, either.

34. It was quite easy to write a semi-narrative around Simon Le Bon. He wasn't afraid to act. You see so many artists, so many giants of the industry, like Rod Stewart, David Bowie, who never really could make a video.





35. I'’m old fashioned...I don'’t believe in marriage.

36. I'm not a practicing Catholic. Just because my mother was a Catholic doesn't mean I need to be a Catholic.



37. You got yourself a fine set of wheels, my man...


38. (on his celebrity crush) I would probably have said Debbie Harry.

39. Oh God, I thought I was going to have a chance there for a bite of my tuna sandwich, but it was not to be...

40. Every three months we had to come up with a new look. And it wasn't just videos. There were album covers and picture discs and posters. We had to come up with a new identity, a new band persona, for every photo shoot. There were four years in particular, from "Planet Earth" to "A View To a Kill," where we had to completely reinvent the look of the band at least four times a year. And that's a lot of work. And sometimes you're not going to get it right. We didn't have stylists. We didn't have anyone shopping for us. We figured it out for ourselves, and I think we did a pretty good job.

41. There was no sex before I was born. 


42. It was quite tricky making videos with five band members who were all jockeying for position. "More of me, please."


43. 6 bathrooms? Who has 6 bathrooms? Do I? What the f*ck is this 6 bathroom thing?

44. You don't put everything out there. I feel like I went into enough detail to give people the sense of what was going on, but you can't tell everything. I mean, how can you? You wouldn't have any friends left.


45. I met Nick at an institute for waywardly homoerotic teenagers...

46. I'm not actually a musician. I prefer extortion, leather and hair products.

47. (on Duran Duran) Like with any team, you have your differences. But you can't afford to let the fighting get out of hand. Our worst fights happened when we were making videos.

48. I wasn't even aware of black music until Chic. Chic wasn't disco. They were the hippest rock 'n' roll band. I lost all my friends over them.

49. We were not a particularly macho band. I was never into the whole macho culture. I was raised on Bowie and glam rock, guys who had a flamboyant presentation of themselves, and they were very ambiguous about their sexual personas. I found that appealing.

50. Yes, all men are created quasi evil.

51. (on David Bowie) He could do performance videos. But it took a new generation of artists to understand the possibilities of the video medium. With Simon, you could take him anywhere, put him in any situation. "Hungry Like the Wolf" is the perfect example. He probably did more in that video, in terms of acting, than any singer had ever done in a music video medium.

52. Are you serious? Do you really care what peanut butter I prefer? Are you in peanut butter marketing or something?


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