I’ve always appreciated & tried to memorise a decent quote as it can help justify your standpoint or beliefs on particular topics of conversation. Whilst the majority of those assembled below do reflect my wider outlook on life, some are witty or throwaway for their own sake. I have intentionally tried to avoid all the best known quotes of any better known or should we say notorious individuals. Enjoy and feel free to steal at will, i did after all.
“Fetch Grandpa another beer son & i’ll spout ya some more wise-ass half-cut BS”
Timeless Quotes About Music
I was a veteran before I was a teenager – Michael Jackson
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read – Frank Zappa
If you don’t know the blues, there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music – Keith Richards
The Human Riff’s baby of the blues turned 50 last week
Music can unite people in a way religion can’t — people from different religions aren’t buried together – Nile Rodgers (Chic, Producer)
Music is the universal language of mankind ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Outre-Mer)
All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song – Louis Armstrong
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken – Ludwig van Beethoven
I opened the door & everybody ran through it. I was left holding the door knob – Bo Diddley
You have flown with me through my music; we have become one and are no longer alone. Men are not brothers until they have laughed and cried together. Thank you – Jimmy Castor, 1973
Would 3 Jimmys have made stimulating conversation?
When you love food, and when you’ve done a high energy concert, you know, a carrot is not gonna work – Aretha Franklin
We don’t tend to do normal gigs. There’s a supporting cast of circus cabaret and burlesque freaks. You don’t wanna watch someone shoegazing – Paul Ronney-Angel (Urban Voodoo Machine)
We have come in the name of Jimi, Sly, Marvin, Stevie, all artists formerly known as spirits and all spirits formerly known as stars. Thus, we have come. As we prepare to journey, we must decide which elements of our sonic past we are going to pack to carry with us into this new day. The distilled ambiance of an Al Green song, the ambiguous sexual majesty of a Prince song, the creative genius of Stevie Wonder. Most of my peers seem to idolize Donald Trump more than Sly Stone, when they don’t seem to realise that Jimi Hendrix was & is a sonic Bill Gates. We seem to be more preoccupied with cultivating our bank accounts than cultivating our crafts – D’Angelo (not Beverly), 1999
Despite the deathly sepulchres of academia, despite the merciless bindweed of critical theory, despite iTunes, despite the labels and the lawyers, despite the boredom and decadence of a dying culture, despite Clash magazine… despite all of this and more, young musicians still fearlessly stride through this valley of carnage and excrement for no reward and no thanks with only madness, despair and death as payment. And this is the genius of music. There’s literally nothing you or I can do to stop it. It thrives in the most hostile of conditions – John Doran (The Quietus, Metal Hammer, Vice)
I want to say a little something that’s long overdue
The disrespect to women has got to be through
To all the mothers and sisters and the wives and friends
I want to offer my love and respect to the end – MCA aka Adam Yauch (RIP), Beastie Boys
“This hold music even tests a buddhist’s patience”
5 Quotes about books
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book – Groucho Marx
The genius that is the ever-idiosyncratically minded Groucho Marx
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them – Ray Bradbury 1920 – 2012
“I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative” – Mary Shelley (Author’s Introduction to Frankenstein)
“A motion picture, music or television has to maintain certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce to risk reaching only a limited audience – only one person. But a book is cheap to print & bind. A book is as private & consensual as sex. A book takes time & effort to consume – something that gives the reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it’s difficult to call a book a ‘mass medium’. No-one really gives a damn about books. No-one has bothered to ban a book in decades. But with that disregard comes the freedom that only books have. This is the advantage that books still have. This is why I write.” Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted Afterword)
“As long as the film-of-the-book stay unmade the novel still belongs to the writer – when it’s made into a film or a TV production than suddenly in one night, or over a month or so, more people see it on screen than have ever read the book, and the visual version contains the overriding images that people think of, even if they’ve read the book as well. That’s a surrender of control or authority that it’s hard to take when you’re used to being God within the boundary of your book, its characters and setting” Iain (M) Banks (in interview with Socialist Review)
In the words of Dr. Elsa, the Austrian Nazi from Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, in person Iain Banks is ‘giddy as a schoolboy’ and hugely entertaining
The 5 best quotes about Fame & Hollywood
If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world – J. R. R. Tolkien
Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you 1,000 dollars for a kiss & 50 cents for your soul – Marilyn Monroe
I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread – Bill Cosby
Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me. Most of my heroes ain’t appeared on no stamp – Chuck D.
The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the great majority of us…Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvellous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why… why? – Octave Mirbeau (less a quote more a mini-essay but then he was a French avant-garde writer so whatcha expect?)
Apples really are the most inhumane sugardaddies
Fame is really terrible. It’s a measure on a scale of the common denominator, minds working on a low level. It’s worthless. A select audience is much better. When people become famous they become pricks. They become inhuman and they lose their humanity and often they lose their talent along with it: their original drive, their originality. They lose everything but their money and their fame – Charles Bukowski
Quotes on religion
I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine, ‘I’m an atheist, thank God.’ It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called Mexican Bus Ride, about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. Its guilt we must escape from, not God – Luis Bunuel
Bunuel’s corruption of another Torture Garden front cover
I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are nothing like your Christ – Mahatma Gandhi
Faith is alright for those who have it – just don’t load it on me. I have more faith in my plumber than I do in the eternal being. Plumbers do a good job. They keep the shit flowing – Charles Bukowski
I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it. I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam – George Carlin
A lot of people say to me, ‘Why did you kill Christ?’ I dunno, it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know – Lenny Bruce (Jewish Comedian)
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land – Jon Stewart
Have you ever noticed how people who believe in evolution look really unevolved? Furry hands & feet y’know? “I believe God created me in one day” Yeah, it looks like he rushed it – Bill Hicks
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along – Anon
I’ve done everything the Bible says — even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! – Ned Flanders
The classic do-godder next door
5 Sci-fi Authors approach to Belief Systems
Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe – Carl Sagan
I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time – Isaac Asimov
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn’t require religion at all – Arthur C. Clarke
There is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you’ve been introduced to socially.
I have the instinctive reaction of Western men when confronted with the sublimely incomprehensible: I grab my camera and start to photograph it – Douglas Adams
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom – Philip K. Dick
He collected more spores of paranoia than the latest model Dyson
5 Best Charles Bukowski Quotes
Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth – alongside of me. It is ultimately destructive to most people. I’m just one apart from that. I do all my creative work while I’m intoxicated.
One of the things that’s most attracted me to poets & writers was their lifestyle
This is very important – to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely & doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything. There has to be great pauses between highs. You just lay on the bed & stare at the ceiling. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry & hateful.
I never write in the daytime. It’s like running through a shopping mall with all your clothes off – everybody can see you. At night…that’s when you pull the tricks…magic
Writing keeps you alive because it eases the monsters in the brain by moving thme to paper. The listing of horrors seems regenerative, and often comes out in the writing as a form of joy or humour. The typewriter often sings soothing songs to the sadness in the heart. It’s wonderous.
You cannot attack shrines. The longer something is around, snobs begin to attach themselves to it like suckerfish. The moment you tell them the truth, they go wild. They can’t handle it. It’s attacking their own thought process.
NEXT TIME: Quote Topics Part Two will include Nature & Environment, Comments that best sum up Youtube Users, Philosophers & Drink!
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