Pete Townshend: Nothing can be better really than waking up in the morning and everything is still the same as it was the day before.
Philip Roth: The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death.
Townshend: That’s what life is. It means nothing.
Roth: Yes. And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
Townshend: The whole thing then becomes incredibly introverted.
***
Roth: I was thinking of an actor—not a particular actor, but an actor, who couldn’t act.
Townshend: The billowy clouds get you, that's the way you think, you think in these kind of adjectives.
Roth: I don’t know. I do the same things I always did.
Townshend: It's like suddenly everybody getting hung up on a bum trip: mother has just fallen down the stairs, dad's lost all his money at the dog track, the baby's got TB. It’s lasted too long. You can sense it.
Roth: What are people saying?
***
Townshend: I'm becoming more and more ordinary as I go along. None of the romance, none of the visual stimulus, none of the sound stimulus.
Roth: A certain sexual charm, erotic charm. Mmm. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.
Townshend: It's so hard to explain. I'm trying to talk about a change, knowing that there isn't going to be a change, trying to describe how I feel a change is going to come about.
Roth: That’s the problem. You want to be descriptive, if you can be.
Townshend: Oh, shit no. You want to commit suicide.