Thomas Earl Petty was an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, and actor. Profoundly inspirational Tom Petty quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous Tom Petty Quotes
You and I will meet again, When we’re least expecting it, One day in some far off place, I will recognize your face, I won’t say goodbye my friend, For you and I will meet again. – Tom Petty
Go after what you really love and find a way to make that work for you, and then you’ll be a happy person. – Tom Petty
Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things. – Tom Petty
I’m always having fun. Playing is fun. Music is fun. – Tom Petty
Well, I started out down a dirty road Started out all alone And the sun went down as I crossed the hill And the town lit up, the world got still I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, the good ol’ days may not return And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Well, some say life will beat you down Break your heart, steal your crown So I’ve started out for God knows where I guess I’ll know when I get there I’m learning to fly around the clouds But what goes up must come down. – Tom Petty
I have never been comfortable being the front man. – Tom Petty
I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real. – Tom Petty
I’ll stand my ground and I won’t back down. – Tom Petty
I think to be successful you have to work really hard but you also have to have a little bit of luck. – Tom Petty
I’m actually better on the guitar than when I started, I think, because I’ve had so much time with it and I still practice and I love to do it and I love to sing. – Tom Petty
I’ve always had a great love for the blues. – Tom Petty
If I’d had to work at Taco Bell I’d have still been out at night trying to play music. – Tom Petty
If you look around at America, that’s one of its biggest problems is you have corporations that can never be pleased at a profit. – Tom Petty
I think it’s important to always offer something new. – Tom Petty
I wouldn’t want to get stuck being an oldie-goldie group, but I don’t mind. I think all the trouble you go through these days to go to one of these concerts, I think I owe them a bit of what they came to hear. – Tom Petty
We don’t really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we’ve been taken for granted. – Tom Petty
Honey, don’t walk out, I’m too drunk to follow. – Tom Petty
When you kill somebody’s little sister with a missile, he’s going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more. – Tom Petty
I ain’t really sure, but it seems I remember the good times – Tom Petty
I love history, doesn’t matter what era, I’m fascinated. – Tom Petty
I would never put my songs in a commercial. – Tom Petty
He [George Harrison] told me he really, really admired John [Lennon]. He probably wanted John’s acceptance pretty bad, you know? – Tom Petty
You spend your life dreaming, running ’round in a trance, You hang out forever and still miss the dance, And if you get lucky, you might find someone, To help you get over the pain that will come. – Tom Petty
When I met Elvis, we didn’t really have a conversation. I was introduced by my uncle, and he sort of grunted my way. What stays with me is the whole scene. I had never seen a real mob scene before. I was really young and impressionable. Elvis really did look – he looked sort of not real, as if he were glowing. – Tom Petty
We haven’t always been boy scouts, but we never lost sight of the music, Let me remind you that this ain’t the end. – Tom Petty
She grew up hard and she grew up fast, in the age of television. – Tom Petty
Whatever you’re looking for, don’t come around here no more. – Tom Petty
There used to be this real sense of community integrity in rock. It has really eroded. Everyone seems to be on their own now. – Tom Petty
There was rock and roll across the dial, when I think of her it makes me smile. – Tom Petty
It just seems to useless to have to work so hard, and nothing ever really seem to come from it. – Tom Petty
You believe what you want to believe. You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee. – Tom Petty
And the days went by like paper in the wind. Everything changed, then changed again. It’s hard to find a friend. It’s hard to find a friend. – Tom Petty
‘Free Fallin” is a very good song. Maybe it would be one of my favorites if it hadn’t become this huge anthem. But I’m grateful that people like it. – Tom Petty
Some grow young, some grow cold… – Tom Petty
I’m not any happier anywhere than when I’m in the studio. I’m over the moon about it. It keeps me young, it keeps me feeling like I have some purpose. – Tom Petty
I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them. – Tom Petty
I like making money like anybody else, and I’m paid well, but I think there is a point at which you can out-price your audience or your base. – Tom Petty
No matter how long you play the guitar, there’s always something else to learn. – Tom Petty
I got my own way of praying. – Tom Petty
So I started out for God knows where. I guess I’ll know when I get there. – Tom Petty
But not me, baby, I’ve got you to save me. – Tom Petty
What I’ve learned about marriage: You need to have each other’s back; you have to be a kind of team going through life. – Tom Petty
I like a good beer. Of course, I’ll drink a bad one too. Let no person thirst for lack of real ale! Thank god for long-necked bottles, the angel’s remedy. – Tom Petty
I don’t treat the band like I’m above them or that they’re a hired hand for me. We’ve never worked that way. So I’m a team player. I would be very uncomfortable having to do this alone. – Tom Petty
I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it’s such a drag when you’re livin’ in the past – Tom Petty
I always liked the idea of the guitar – because cowboys played the guitar. – Tom Petty
I never could have dreamed that her heart was so wicked, but I keep coming back because it’s so hard to kick it. – Tom Petty
There’s a freeway running through the yard. – Tom Petty
I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there. – Tom Petty
Oh yeah, alright, take it easy baby, make it last all night. She was an American Girl. – Tom Petty
If you listen long enough you can hear my skin grow tough love is painful to the touch must be made of stronger stuff. – Tom Petty
I’m certainly not a Robin Hood, I’m not that way. I don’t want to come through, burn everybody for $200 a ticket and then they can’t afford to come see me again. Plus, I just don’t think it’s right. I don’t think we need that much money. I just do what seems like the logical thing to do. – Tom Petty
As we celebrate mediocrity, all the boys upstairs want to see. How much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free. – Tom Petty
You belong among the wildflowers You belong in a boat out at sea You belong with your love on your arm You belong somewhere you feel free – Tom Petty
Buy me a drink, sing me a song; take me as I come, cause I can’t stay long. – Tom Petty
Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I’m concerned, that’s success. – Tom Petty
I’ve learned one thing, and that’s to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don’t have. Drink ’til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does. – Tom Petty
Music really isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s all about people relating to each other and doing something that’s really from the soul. It must come from the soul. – Tom Petty
In a world that keeps on pushing me around, I’m gonna stand my ground, and I won’t back down. – Tom Petty
You belong somewhere you feel free. – Tom Petty
The waiting is the hardest part, every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is hardest part. – Tom Petty
Any time you’re making a living at what you love to do, you’re blessed. – Tom Petty
You were the one who made things different, you were the one who took me in. You were the one thing I could count on, above all, you were my friend. – Tom Petty
Time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet, baby, grass is growing. – Tom Petty
You need eagles wings to get over things that make no sense in this world. – Tom Petty
Running down a dream… working on a mystery… going wherever it leads. – Tom Petty
I’ve got a room at the top of the world tonight. I can see everything tonight. – Tom Petty
I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality. – Tom Petty
I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. – Tom Petty
Where the sky begins, the horizon ends, despite the best intentions. – Tom Petty
I don’t understand the ones that have no sense of hope and invest in hate. That’s not gonna work out, you know? It’s a waste of your time! – Tom Petty
I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings. Coming down is the hardest thing. – Tom Petty
Most things I worry about never happen anyway. – Tom Petty
I’m more interested in what I’m going to leave behind me than in making a big hit record. I’ve refined what I do for a long time. If getting better at it means it goes over the heads of those who only wanted to party, then so be it. – Tom Petty
I’m not exactly a guy who makes new friends easily. – Tom Petty
The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It’s the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It’s very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It’s in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it. – Tom Petty
When I decided to be a musician I reckoned that that was going to be the way of less profit, less money. I was sort of giving up the idea of making a lot of money. It was what I loved to do. I would have done it anyway. If I’d had to work at Taco Bell I’d have still been out at night trying to play music. – Tom Petty
You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don’t take life for granted any more. I’m really glad to be here. – Tom Petty
I don’t think it’s a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem. – Tom Petty
I have turned down a lot of money for things that would have made me feel cheesy. – Tom Petty
When I was a kid, we didn’t have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering. – Tom Petty
Sometimes, giving up your privacy is a little like going to the dentist and we have let him have access that no one’s ever had. – Tom Petty
TV does not care about you or what happens to you. It’s downright bad for your health now, and that’s not a far-out concept. I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. – Tom Petty
It’s funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can’t afford the music. – Tom Petty
The great thing about the Wilburys was that none of us had to take the heat by ourselves. I was just a member of the band. Nobody felt like he was above anybody else. We had such a good time. – Tom Petty
I think television’s become a downright dangerous thing. It has no moral barometer whatsoever. If you want to talk about something that is all about money, just watch the television. – Tom Petty
I’ve never had any idea that what I like would resonate with the audience, and I’m pleasantly surprised when it does. – Tom Petty
I don’t know, my music has always just come from where the wind blew me. Like where I’m at during a particular moment in time. – Tom Petty
I tend to write on an acoustic guitar or the piano. I have kind of a rule: if I can’t sit down and play this and get the song over, I don’t take it to the band, because most any good song, you can sit down and deliver it with a piano or a guitar. – Tom Petty
I think that if people realize that with an mp3, you’re only getting five percent of the sound that’s there. But when you hear the entire thing… I think it would save the music business. It’s such a drastic change. – Tom Petty
It’s very easy to be cynical about the hall of fame. But on the other hand, it’s really a beautiful thing for someone like me. I dedicated my entire life to this music. – Tom Petty
The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit. – Tom Petty
When you get older, your health becomes important to you, things start breaking down, you’ve always got a different ache or pain. – Tom Petty
Rock n’ roll was one thing, and then they chopped off the ‘roll’ and called it ‘rock,’ which became a sort of umbrella term for anything with a guitar in it. Like hair bands. How could we possibly believe that? It’s just gotten downright silly, to the point where now it’s sort of become like professional wrestling. – Tom Petty
Making a record? You’ve got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it’s the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you’re already 90% there. I always tell young people it’s all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs. – Tom Petty
When I go to see people, I always kind of hope they are going to play some kind of songs I know. So you’ve got to know your audience. It’s kind of something that is a blessing and a curse in a way. You’re obligated to play some of that stuff that people know, but I don’t think that’s all you have to do. – Tom Petty
The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn’t that bad! The writing came natural to me. – Tom Petty
We’re rather fond of it and we think you’ll like it, too. – Tom Petty
We have a set list, but we work up a lot more (songs) than we’re gonna do. That way we can throw things in and change it around, especially if we’re in a place for two days. It’s good to keep yourself interested. The last show we did five songs we never rehearsed and that certainly sparked us up. – Tom Petty
like a deer in the headlights, frozen in real time and I’m losing my mind, it’s time to move on – Tom Petty
We’ve given him access we’ve never given anybody. – Tom Petty
Let me run with you tonight, I’ll take you on a moonlit ride…. – Tom Petty
It didn’t affect his ability for a long time. Heroin can be like that with musicians; I think that’s why you see so many musicians drift that way, because you can remain musical for a long time. But I think, without exception, they all hit the wall eventually and the creativity goes. – Tom Petty
We enjoy playing with each other, which I think is a pretty important part of this. If we didn’t, we’d have given it up a long time ago. The idea when we started was to take five people and keep ’em together no matter what and see what we could get out of it, and we’ve pretty much stuck to that plan. – Tom Petty
When you shoot well, you can hide a lot of deficiencies. I like the (3-pointer) as well as anyone, but we wanted to be a little more patient on offense in the second half. – Tom Petty
We said ‘You’re going to have to quit this. It’s gonna get you. You just don’t win with heroin. You die or you go to jail. There’s no middle ground. There’s no other options,’ – Tom Petty
You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don’t have. Drink ’til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does. – Tom Petty
We were pretty efficient in the first half. Our passing was pretty good against their zone. – Tom Petty
They are a scrappy team and they didn’t quit. They battled the whole way. – Tom Petty
I’m reaching there to try and find a theme. It’s just a really nice collection of songs. I think it does have an underlying theme of time and what it does to you. – Tom Petty
I’m frustrated by what I hear. Maybe it’s not meant for me. Personally, I’m way too bright for a lot of the hip-hop lyrics to affect. I’m much too smart to think that jewelry or how cool I am is really going to change much about my personality. If you’re dumb enough that it entertains you, have a great time. But I am seeking more than that. – Tom Petty
I really do love coming to this particular place. – Tom Petty
You’ve also got to rebound the basketball, and I think Hartley will be the biggest challenge we’ve faced this year. – Tom Petty
I want to be successful. Not just money. Just making a successful record and a successful show. I could feel successful without selling a million records. – Tom Petty
The truth is that if you play on TV there is always a sponsor. There is no way around it. I’ve already passed on so much money I don’t worry about it anymore. – Tom Petty
I didn’t worry about my career ending, but there were days where I felt pretty beat up by it all and just pretty tired, because they didn’t make it easy for me. And coming right off the last lawsuit, it was the last thing I wanted to get involved in. When it was over, we didn’t really celebrate, we were just exhausted. I lost all interest in the record business and never wanted to do anything except hand in a record again. – Tom Petty
I love the music. I’m never, ever tired of playing it. – Tom Petty
If 20,000 people start to sing, you tend to go along with it. – Tom Petty
I started playing the bass because nobody else would play the bass, and then I got bumped up into singing because no one else really wanted to sing. So I learned how to sing and I wrote the songs, so I tended to get the most attention. – Tom Petty
I think sometimes maybe you’re going to connect with the audience more than others, but the journey is about getting all there is to get out of this group of people. – Tom Petty
I’m not trying to be cool. I have a problem with lights. I have one eye that’s become super-sensitive to lighting, so I do wear sunglasses quite a bit. – Tom Petty
Way up in the nosebleeds we watched him on the screen, they’d hung between the billboards so cheaper seats could see. – Tom Petty
Just wonderin’, waitin’, worryin’ about some silly little things, that just don’t add up to nothin’. – Tom Petty
Eddie waited ’til he finished high school, he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo. – Tom Petty
I had the radio on, I was driving. Trees flew by, me and Del were singing, Little Runaway, I was flying. – Tom Petty
There was no use pretending, no magic left to hear, all the music gave me was a craving for lite beer. – Tom Petty
My sister got lucky, married a yuppie, and took him for all he was worth. Now she’s a swinger dating a singer, I can’t decide which is worse. – Tom Petty
He don’t wanna change, what don’t need to change. – Tom Petty
Lord, please watch over all these lost children born to chase the hurricane. – Tom Petty
There goes your freedom of choice, there goes the last human voice. – Tom Petty
I’m not interested in the TV much. I quit watching the news a couple years ago and my outlook on life has gotten a whole lot better. – Tom Petty
Last dance with Mary Jane One more time to kill the pain I feel summer creepin’ in and I’m Tired of this town again – Tom Petty
Redemption comes to those who wait, forgiveness is the key. – Tom Petty
Even the losers get lucky sometimes. Even the losers keep a little bit of pride. They get lucky sometimes. – Tom Petty
I’m so tired of being tired. Sure as night will follow day most things I worry about will never happen anyway. – Tom Petty
Let’s get to the point Let’s roll another joint. – Tom Petty
