My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

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

Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I'm concerned, that's success.

Tom Petty

Most things I worry about never happen anyway.

Tom Petty

I feel sorry for kids these days. They get so much homework. Remember the days when we put a belt around our two books and carried them home? Now they're dragging a suitcase. They have school all day, then homework from six until eleven. There's no time left to be creative.

Tom Petty

If you're not getting older, you're dead.

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

As time goes by, you seem to weed out the things that were making your life hard.

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

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

I'm not exactly a guy who makes new friends easily.

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

In the mid-'60s, AM radio, pop radio, was just this incredible thing that played all kinds of music... You could hear Frank Sinatra right into the Yardbirds. The Beatles into Dean Martin. It was this amazing thing, and I miss it, in a way, because music has become so compartmentalized now, but in those days, it was all right in one spot.

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

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

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

I would never put my songs in a commercial.

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

Rock isn't a young music anymore. I don't think it's necessarily even a youth-oriented music.

Tom Petty

'Southern Accents,' I think that's one of my best, really. That would have been 1984, and I wrote that on the piano in the studio at home. I had a studio, and I just happened to be down there in the middle of the night. It was quite late, probably early morning, and I just started to play, and a song just started to appear.

Tom Petty

I like to be an optimist, but I like to be a realist, too.

Tom Petty