Robert Smith
I think, at heart, unless you discover faith in something else, something other, it's very hard to shake the thing that you're adrift alone.Collection: Alone
I don't find the technology threatening. A lot of people my age, my generation, find it difficult to immerse themselves. But I would never preclude the idea of using any technology if I thought it suited the end result.Collection: Age
People think it's funny that I enjoy dreaming so much. I just use it as a form of entertainment. It's very private. I don't see my dreams as separate. I mean, half the time I'm wandering around dreaming anyway.Collection: Funny
I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.Collection: Famous
I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.Collection: Romantic
I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with and where I am. Having said that, I'm not really a person of habit, because what I do in my job is travel around the world and play concerts to people, and occasionally do very weird things.Collection: Travel
I've always spent more time with a smile on my face than not, but the thing is, I don't write about it.Collection: Smile
I lose myself in music because I can't be bothered explaining what I feel to anyone else around me.Collection: Music
I still frequent my parents' house. I go there to escape, back to the bedroom that I grew up in. Just to sit there and feel small.
I would be more familiar with Janet Jackson than I was with the Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, because I didn't want to listen to my competitors for fear of nicking ideas off them.
I've got a presence on all the social networks, in fact, but I've never once sent a message. I'm there because otherwise, someone's going to pretend to be me.
I never answer if someone knocks on my door and only the band and my manager have my phone number. In any case my phone doesn't ring so I never notice it. I occasionally just walk past and pick it up to see if anyone's there.
A lot of journalists give me a hard time about how I look, but I've never met a journalist I'd rather look like.
Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.
No, come to think of it, I don't think the Cure will end, but I can make up an ending if you want me to.
I think that if you become a parent, you stop being a child, and your position in relation to your parents changes.
I am very self-conscious a lot of the time.
I get a much more extreme reaction when I have my hair really short. I look thuggish when I shave my head and wear big boots. I walk into a newsagent and people think I'm going to jump the counter. It's a much more extreme reaction.
I started out in the 'Cure' reflecting things that I thought were important, and it's reached a point where it takes over and becomes the thing that is important.
Reading is something I've really missed, not being able to enter people's worlds.
Every animal would rather die themselves than lose their offspring. But it's just genes, isn't it? All of our existence is spent worrying about the next generation, but we don't actually seem to get anywhere.
Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.
I'm in the strange position of the world drifting away from me, but you know what? I'm actually quite content with that. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't feel like, 'Oh God, I'm being left behind.'
Apart from the fact that I've got a strange job, I do lead a fairly normal life. I do my own shopping. I don't feel constrained by who I am because of what I do; I often feel disappointed by my lack of ability. I get frustrated at myself, but I think everyone does.
Perhaps not as badly applied and not as obvious, but for thousands of years, people have worn makeup on stage.
The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'
I always place myself as the archetypal Cure fan. I'm the wrong age, but I still think that if I like anything particularly, our fans will.
Whenever I'm home, I haven't got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.
For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.
I'm happy quite a lot of the time. I've done far more than I ever thought I would have, so I'd be very hard-pressed to walk around miserable.
You know, the Internets made us more aware of what people think about us.
I look thuggish when I shave my head and wear big boots. I walk into a newsagent and people think I'm going to jump the counter.
I do a job I really, really love and I kind of have fun with. People think you can't be grown up unless you're moaning about your job.
The very first concert I ever went to on my own was actually Rory Gallagher. In a one-month period in 1973 or '74, I saw him, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. I wasn't really a big Rory Gallagher fan, but I thought his guitar playing was fabulous. But Thin Lizzy, they were fabulous.
I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine.
I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point?
Sometimes I'll get to the end of a song, open my eyes and there's all these faces peering at me. It's quite horrifying.
Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it.
The idea of appealing to people of a like mind and like spirit always appealed to me.
I had every intention of 'Bloodflowers' being the last Cure record. I thought it would be fantastic to finish with the best thing we'd ever done, but I wasn't sure we could pull it off.
When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.
You don't always have to sing dark things to be thoughtful.
I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else.
I have never liked Morrissey, and I still don't. I think it's hilarious, actually, what things I've heard about him, what he's really like, and his public persona is so different. He's such an actor.
You put on eyeliner, and people start screaming at you. How strange, and how marvellous.
You can't allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don't consider what you do to have any value at all, and that's nonsense.
If you feel alienated from people around you, it's because no one tries to understand you.
Living, it's awful for me.
In some cases, I quite like irritating people who need to be irritated.
It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.