It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.
— Robert Smith
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.
Without faith that there's a world beyond the one we live in, I don't see how it's possible to get rid of angst.
I never liked Queen. I can honestly say I hated Queen and everything that they did.
I've discovered special makeup by a company called M.A.C. You could wear it on the surface of the sun and it wouldn't move.
I write with a pen and paper. Never on a laptop.
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.'
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.
If you acquiesce to one interview, there's always another waiting in the wings. Also if you're interviewed repeatedly, you just start repeating yourself. I don't like to do that.
It's really nice meeting people after a concert. Still, it's very weird to be at the center of a group of 30 people all listening to what you're saying. When that group turns into 300 people, it goes on from weird. Some people revel in it, and I don't.
Perhaps not as badly applied and not as obvious, but for thousands of years, people have worn makeup on stage.
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.
I'm not really obsessed with death.
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.
Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free, and when you're nine or 10, your life is entirely dominated by adults. So he represented this thing that I wanted to be. Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist - before that I wanted to be a footballer.
Irony is the recourse of the weak-minded wimp, I think. I hate bands that deliver their songs with knowing smiles on their faces, so that if those songs fall flat they can say 'Ah well, we never really meant it anyway.' It's so dishonest.
Anyone can rehearse and play constantly any song in the world.
There were only two times in my life when I've actually felt down about things and gotten myself into a full mental mess. One of the times was in 1982. I had a horrible time for a few months and felt pretty desperate. Then again in 1984, for various reasons, not all of them within my control. Since then, I just wander in and out of black moods.
The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.
When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.
When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'
Whenever I'm home, I haven't got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.
When you're on stage, the real world just drops away for that time. It's pretty intense.
The idea of appealing to people of a like mind and like spirit always appealed to me.
I am very self-conscious a lot of the time.
I lose myself in music because I can't be bothered explaining what I feel to anyone else around me.
I just don't feel comfortable anymore with the kind of attention that I'm getting. It's purely the numbers of people that want a bit of the Cure or want a bit of me.
Performing doesn't come that naturally to me, even though I've done it for years.
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'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.
Living, it's awful for me.
I'm not a morose person; it's just that my best songs reflect on the sadder aspects of life.
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.
If I put a value on my music, and no one's prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan; it can't work.
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.
I don't care where the Cure is placed in the pantheon of rock. I don't care if we're perceived as relevant. We're never worried how we fit in. I don't even want to fit in.
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 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.
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.
You don't always have to sing dark things to be thoughtful.
In some cases, I quite like irritating people who need to be irritated.
I despise people who revel in the ignorance of not being able to play their instrument.
If you feel alienated from people around you, it's because no one tries to understand you.
I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.
I just play Cure music, whatever that is.
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 think that if you become a parent, you stop being a child, and your position in relation to your parents changes.
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.
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.
You put on eyeliner, and people start screaming at you. How strange, and how marvellous.
