Browsing Quotes With Tag: long-way-down (32)
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All those wooly hats, and mustaches with parts of them missing, all those new tattoos and plastic shoes… I mean, I’m a liberal guy, and I didn’t want Bush to bomb Iraq, and I like a toke as much as the next guy, but these people still fill my heart with fear and loathing, mostly because I know they wouldn’t have liked my band. When we played a college town, and we walked out in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don’t like real music, these people. They don’t like the Ramones or the Temptations or the 'Mats; they like DJ Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps. Or else they all pretend that they’re fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You can take the piss out of anyone who’s unhappy if you’re cruel enough.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To live outside the law, you must be honest.
Speaker: Bob DylanPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Speaker: Oscar WildePosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
Speaker: Oscar WildePosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not many real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn’t. It just pissed me off because I wasn’t being paid for it, and it didn’t get me on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Oscar Wilde once said, “One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.” Well, fucking right on, Oscar. My real life was full of headlining shows at Wembley and Madison Square Garden and platinum records, and Grammys, and that wasn’t the life I was leading, which is maybe why it felt like I could throw it away.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we’re not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest one out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists… I was the only one who didn’t have a college degree. (I don’t understand how there isn’t more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: You’re, like, the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenaged motherfucker with the munchies… I mean, shouldn’t you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw?) Anyway. There’s more than one way to be a loser. There’ s sure more than one way of losing.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:48 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it’s hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:48 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The ledge felt safe. There was no humiliation and shame there – beyond the humiliation and shame you’d expect to feel if you were sitting on a ledge, on your own, on New Year’s Eve.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
That’s what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn’t come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I’ve heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the darkness); I’ve heard a hostage describe how he survived because one of his captors was fascinated by the London Zoo family discount card he kept in his wallet. You want to talk about big things, but it’s the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn’t know where to start.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But no one attacked me. A couple of people wished me a happy New Year, but that was about all. There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being afraid.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don’t care what anyone says.
Speaker: Elizabeth McCrackenPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:45 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!