"We write pop songs, As time has gone on, we've gotten more into pushing our material as far as it can go. But there was no intention of it being 'art.' It's a reflection of all the disparate things we were listening to when we recorded it."

"People are born with certain faces, like my father was born with a face that people want to hit."

"The video of 'Paranoid Android' has been censored by MTV. They took all nipples out of the cartoon, but they had no problem with the scene in which a man cuts off his own arms and legs."

[on the press exposure of OK Computer]
"I'm terrified. It's just going into the whole... *pause* The wheels start turning again... The industry stars moving again. This time bigger, more terrifying. Basically it's out of our control"

"You will never make friends unless you like everyone genuinely. Oh well, I'm fucked then aren't I?"

"If you want to be entertained, go and see Hanson"

"The others were all brought up to be polite. I wasn't."

"It's like a supply and demand thing. It's like 'Well, this is what they want me to do, this is what they want to hear. So I'll do more of this, cuz this is great... and they love me.' Suddenly people start giving you money as well. So then you've got money and you get used to this lifestyle. And you don't wanna take any risks cuz they've got you by the balls, and you've got all these little things that you've bought, or you're attached to. And you start spending all this money... And that's how they get ya!"

"My girlfriend's allergic to all fur, so we can't have anything except goldfish. We had some really exotic Oriental fish in this pond in our garden. Over Christmas, they died. It was down to me being completely vacant, because you have to keep a hole in the ice to keep them from suffocating. That was my only encounter ever with pets and it didn't work out very well."

"It's a fine line between writing something with genuine emotional impact and turning into little idiots feeling sorry for ourselves and playing stadium rock."

"The freakiest thing about all of this, is the idea that you would be one of those bands to somebody. That in itself is the reason to keep going. The rest is bullshit."

"Being in a band turns you into a child and keeps you there."

"Y'know, if you're bored of the songs, then you're bored of the songs. Not much you can do"

"They didnīt let us play at the Grammy awards cause they thought we wernīt good for the ratings. We were so happy man..."

"Exit Music was the first performance that we recorded where every note of it makes me really happy."

"I wake up on a normal day and I go out for a meal with my girlfriend but someone is sitting there watching me for a while. Then he comes up and asks me for my autograph and it's like 'Well, yeah, I could give you my autograph but, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not going because I'm here with my girlfriend - this is my space and you're invading it'. I mean, I don't want to be seen as malicious or nasty but it gets too much sometimes."

"I can't delegate. I don't care what anybody says about burning myself out because I just feel like I have to do all this stuff, it's too important."

"Yes, I would've loved to play the guitar, to become a guitarist in a good band. I never thought about becoming a singer. But I was the only one who wrote songs, so I had to sing."

[on playing Creep at MTV's Beach House]
"The beach party. We swore that would be the last time we'd do that fucking thing. An MTV beach party. Standing by a pool, because the sun didn't come out."

"I got into the music business thinking it was really radical, that it wasn't really a business at all, that it was a lot of people being artistic and creative. Not true, and it made me very depressed."

"The thing I remember most about America is that it's silly. That can be quite a relief at times."

"Last year we were the most hyped band. We were number 1 in all the polls and... and it's just bollocks man. It's bollocks. It changes how... It's just a head-fuck. It's a complete head-fuck... Isn't it?"

[on Oasis]
"They're a joke aren't they? It's just lots of middle class people applauding a bunch of guys who act stupid and write really primitive music. Then people say 'oh it's so honest'"

"When I was born my left eye was completely paralysed. My eyelid was permanently shut and they thought it would be like that for the rest of my life. Then some specialist bloke realised he could graft a muscle in, like a bionic eye. So I had 5 major operations between the age of nought to 6. They fucked up the last one and I went half blind. I can kind of see. I can judge when I hit something but that's about it. They made me wear this eye patch on my eye for a year, saying, 'Oh, well, it's just got lazy through all the operations', which was crap because they damaged it. The first operation I had, I was just learning to speak, and apparently I said, 'what do I got?' I didn't know. I woke up and I had this huge thing on my eye, and according to my parents I just doubled and started crying."

"We had a great time doing Airbag. There was a party going on for like three days in a row. By the end of it the studio was just a fucking pit of all sorts of disgusting things -- half-finished bottles of wine and beer spilled on the desk and ashtrays everywhere. It was great. We do play cards and bridge and shit like everybody says we do all the time. But then, we go smoke crack in the bathroom afterwards."

[on Just]
"A competition between me and Jonny to get as many chords as possible into a song."

[on British press]
"Every move you make has already been done, and taken the piss out of"

"I went out one night and there was these blokes, townie guys, waiting to beat someone up and they found me. They said something, I turned around , blew them a kiss and that was it. They beat the living shit out of me. One was kicking me, one had a stick and the other was smashing me in the face. That put me off fighting a bit."

[on becoming an adult]
"You will become a hypocrite, you'll become a liar. You'll try and paper up your own cracks... and that's what being an adult is all about. Then you have babies and... *shrug* that's it. *long pause* Sorry! *laughs*"

"I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world. They're just sitting there. I can hit them with a two by four"

"Colin and I got into cooking. But all the things we cooked had to have pesto in. Colin always referred to it as the 'pesto slop'. It would taste great, though.. you know, idiot food. But a month after I moved out I ate some pesto and started feeling really sick. I haven't eaten it since."

[on being famous]
"We're from England and English people aren't impressed. There's this automatic assumption that any degree of success means that you've... you've cheated. Or you're full of shit or whatever. We're fascinated by the fact that in America celebrities live on that higher plate. They're untouchable. It's fucking mad"

"I have this thing about my own voice on record. No matter what I sing, it sounds really serious, and I sound self-loathing or whatever, which was just driving me nuts because that's not what I was writing."

"My girlfriend has this quote in her sketchbook: Remain orderly in your life so you can be free and chaotic in your work. I think basically you lose it when you destroy your brain or destroy yourself emotionally or burn yourself up."

[on The Bends]
"It's incredibly annoying that no one's noticed the giggles in that album. The song 'The Bends' is completely jokey, completely taking the piss. None of that stuff had ever happened to us when we wrote it. That was our Bowie pastiche, our joke song ! And I really do wish I'd never written that fucking song - it's become the bane of my life. Hundreds of journalists asking - every single fucking interview : "Do you wish it was the sixties ?" No, I don't wish it was the fucking sixties - Levis jeans wish it was the sixties - I certainly fucking don't.

"Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible. We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams."

"I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have. So I end up spending my entire life feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. That's how I deal with it."

"After the EP came out, the slagging started. It made me so paranoid I wasn't able to write. Everything I did seemed contrived because, true or not, I was anxious to avoid the criticisms. I froze, couldn't write a thing, so when we were offered a north erican tour, we jumped on it because it was a great relief to get out of the UK."

[on the band's success following OK Computer]
"I'm really, really worried. We've been running too long on bravado. Believing how wonderful everything is... And we are"

"I spent a lot of time trying not to do voices like mine. The voices on Karma Police, Paranoid Android and Climbing up the Walls are all different personas. I think Lucky, the lyric and the way it's sung, is really positive, really exciting. No Surprises is someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't. Electioneering is a preacher ranting in front of a bank of microphones."

[on OK Computer]
"There's been a lot of looking at headlines and feeling wildly impotent. A lot of the album's about that."

"I can be very drunk in a club in Oxford on a Monday night and some guy comes up to you and buys you a drink and says that the last record you made changed his life. That means something."

[OK Computer's lyrics]
"It was like there's a secret camera in a room and it's watching the character who walks in - a different character for each song. The camera's not quite me. It's neutral, emotionless, but not emotionless at all. In fact, the very opposite."

[on OK Computer]
"I was really amazed of how people described the sound. Like the sound of Edīs guitar at the start of No Surprises or the way Airbag starts. One sounds like childīs toy, the other sounds like a car accident. And for people to pick up on those things was a real fucking kick."

[on working on OK Computer]
"The big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another miserable, morbid and negative record lyrically, but I really don't want to, at all. And I'm deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. I'm not ble to put them into music yet and I don't want to just force it."

[on the Spice Girls]
"I agree with whoever said they're soft porn. They're the Antichrist. I don't want any part of it, and if I had kids, I wouldn't want them to have any part of it, either. I'd move to an island where you can't get hold of any Spice Girls stuff."

[on unofficial Radiohead sites]
"They certainly seem to be writing my lyrics for me; if I'm ever stuck for an idea I go and read them."

"It's a shame we didn't get to see any of the city, but that's fucking normal for what we do"

"Everything that's happened after Glastonbury has been a let down. The feeling when I shouted at the lighting engineer to turn on the audience lights so we could see something, cuz we couldn't see anything. And then, there are 40,000 people all along, and up a hill... with lighters and whatever. And fires going in the distance, and tents. I've never ever felt like that... It wasn't a human feeling. It was something else completely different."

"Whenever I meet a beauty, I escape or hide in a corner. Not that I think they are intimidating, but they attract horrible people. Some guys really do their utmost to make these beautiful women believe how good they are. Beauty means power. And I'm a bit cynical towards all that. Honestly I've never met a beautiful girl that I really liked. You never get the chance to really get to know them. Result : I don't even take the effort now to try to meet them".

"If people get it, they wouldn't think it's depressing. When people always say that fucking annoying thing about how my work's so depressing, well it's not because.. it's just words, and I put the words to music which I think it's an uplifting thing, otherwise there would be no point in doing this at all."

"I've been in two accidents myself. One was serious, and I could have died. I was really young, and I had just got a car and spun it off the road, and was very near to being hit by two other cars coming the other way. I missed them by inches. Then you have that thing where you walk away from the car and you just ask yourself, 'Well, why am I lucky? Why am I allowed to walk away from this?' when you constantly hear of friends who die in car accidents for no reason. It fucks with my head completely. The day we have to stop getting in cars will be a very good day."

[on recording OK Computer]
"We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars."

"I started singing into this little stereo mike tied to the end of a broomstick handle. Everyone just started falling about laughing, and that was that, that was my introduction to singing"

"Man-o-war is very melodramatic. Too melodramatic. When we started out, it was just a homage to bond themes really. I like it. It's pretty much the opposite to everything we're writing."

"The thing that worries me about the computer age is the fact that people know so much about you. It's an incredible invasion of privacy. And no matter where you are in the world people can monitor you if you're using your credit card. I heard this weird rumor on the Internet about how the military are funding this great big research project, and basically they believe that in the future, the balance of power won't be determined by who has the most nuclear weapons, but by who has all the information. I'm not afraid of being taken over by computers though, because the thing is, computers cannot resist. You can always smash 'em up, and they're totally defenseless. All we need are more people with hammers."

[on American radio stations]
"There's a line in Karma Police about 'he buzzes like a fridge' and when you're driving around, and you have the alternative stations on in the background, or in your hotel room, it's just a fridge buzzing. That's all I'm hearing. I'm just hearing the buzz. It's really odd. It's kind of funny though really. You have to laugh"

"I spend 99 percent of my time worrying about what it is we're doing. For someone else to actually feel it's in any way inspiring to them... I just can't get my head around that. It's amazing how much confidence completely changes a band."

"Is dinner ready?"

"If the media spotlight affects my work or represses what i want to say in the future, then it is bad."

"People sometimes say we take things too seriously, but it's the only way you'll get anywhere."

[on Pablo Honey and The Bends]
"The second album is going to be much better than the first. The first one was quite flawed, and hopefully the new one will make more sense. I like the first album, but we were very naive. We didn't really know how to use the studio."

[on Fake Plastic Trees]
(some things on Fake Plastic Trees) "Last night I was called by the American record company insisting, well almost, insisting, that we used a Bob Clearmountain mix of it. I said 'No way'. All the ghost-like keyboards sounds and weird strings were completely gutted out of his mix, like he'd gone in with a razor blade and chopped it all up. It was horrible."

[on Pablo Honey]
"The reaction when it come out was very ambivalent. People went, 'Yeah, there's something there' but it was difficult to find'. And "Creep" was one of the songs on the first album where we did start to realize what a studio could do - that there's a lot more to it than just going in, setting up and trying to make it sound like it's live."

"It's easy to be miserable. Being happy is tougher - and cooler."

[on Pablo Honey and The Bends]
"The first album was quite varied and there's still going to be a lot of styles. lt's [the 2nd album] going to be a lot calmer and a lot simpler, without being boring. The hysteria will be more subtle. We're learnin to play quietly again, and to rely on the strength of the songs."

[on recording Kid A]
"It was necessary to go away and glue back the pieces. In a way in order to survive we had to stop being answerable"

[at Glastonbury]
"Could you turn the lights on so we can see the people? Cuz we haven't seen 'em yet... Hello!"

[on Kid A]
"I cannot get my head around the fact that it's number one in America at all. It just doesn't mean anything. It's just la-la."