Autobiography Quotes
"My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets."
"Fields are places in books, and books are placed in libraries."
"We, though, are out here in the now, unchecked and un-governed."
"The dark stone of the terraced houses is black with soot, and the house is a metaphor for the soul because beyond the house there is nothing."
"The ordinary process of living takes up everyone’s time and energy."
"Look around and see the gutter-bred – all doing as well as they can in circumstances that they are not responsible for, but for which they are punished."
"We are fascinated by shop fronts that remain lit up into the night, often the only form of light for miles."
"The industrial city has a teeming imagination."
"All that you consider hip and happening will also tumble into nostalgia just at that moment when you finally come to realize where everything is, and how things ought to be."
"Watches and clocks are set to mark the sound and vision of ice-cream vans."
"Song made a difference to everything, and permitted expressions that otherwise had no way through."
"All human activity is fruitless when pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question."
"If I can sing, I am free, and no legislation can stop me."
"Loudly and wildly the music played, always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived."
"The song bears witness, the body weaves, and there are no camera cuts to blandly smiling session-players when all we want to see is the sculptured singer – alone, carrying all, sub-plot and sub-text, the physical autobiography; simultaneously, subjectively and objectively at the same time."
"The tough and tearless boy who had advised Vincent Morgan to ‘fuck off’ was Michael Foley, and as star witness I slung my glass into the sea. At last, an individual!"
"By their unlucky presence, the teachers surely felt a similar way about themselves."
"Whether at St Mary’s or St Wilfrid’s, I am spared the indignity of ever staying for school dinners, although I cannot escape the daily waft of dead pig and foul fish sandblasting both buildings and clinging to the senses for a lifetime."
"My face had by now taken on the demeanor of continual deep regret, which only music could soothe."
"I didn’t want to live unseen, camouflaged within the crowd. I knew then that life could only ever be changed for the better because somebody somewhere had taken a risk – often with their own life."
"The divide bristles – West permanently at a Denver Bronco’s training session, and Smith playing with full nobility up and out to the studio lights – a Twelfth Night jester allowed his moment."
"I am at this point struck by the understanding that this freakish use of the leather strap is the answer for all teachers who find themselves in a situation that they simply cannot deal with, or answer. It is their weakness, not ours."
"Music was rarely heard anywhere – never on television apart from Top of the Pops, Disco 2, Lift Off with Ayshea, or the unreliably placed Old Grey Whistle Test."
"These were times when all were judged squarely and fairly on their musical tastes, and a personal music collection read as private medical records."
"Nothing, I have decided, could waste precious life more than trigonometry and logarithms."
"For me, there was no one available with whom to discuss these urgings of the heart, because nobody could understand how the head could ring persistently with song."
"My hair is, after all, my own, and nobody else’s."
"Dear God, let time pass quickly, and let this end. Let me be older and let this mediocrity pass as a dream – one in which the utmost was done to bury me alive."
"But Roxy Music will drop quickly from the emotional radar soon, as singer Bryan Ferry announces that his favorite food is veal – second only to foie gras in savage cruelty."
"I had no idea that a complete poem could be as short as two lines."
"The chief defect of Henry King was chewing little bits of String."
"With a face of distressed concrete, W. H. Auden drops into view."
"My mother had decided to call me Steven after the American actor Steve Cochran."
"How, I wonder, would Lou Reed cope with this?"
"All of the body is thrown into the vocal delivery; bare-chested in tight silver pants, Iggy defined the new manhood that the world so badly needed."
"Their contribution to thought marks them out as our very own Goethe, Gide, and Gertrude Stein."
"Ah, but not today – shadow close, swift as a swallow ..."
"Of course, elderly people were not always elderly, and are often new to such a surprising fate."
"I explode from intensity. I cannot cope with anything other than my inability to cope."
"I am difficult and withdrawn – a head, really, but not a body – full of passion within, but none outwardly."
"There is no one to take me on, and no one to bother about me."
"I am worn out by my own emotions, and Manchester is a barbaric place where only headless savages can survive."
"I am reliant upon the postage stamp, and tactlessly revealing letters are catapulted north and south – anywhere where a considerate soul might lurk."
"Certainly, there could be no shame attached to wheelchairs, but there aren’t many in the Top 40."
"He, of course, has no choice but to tell you otherwise."
"Every night for months the record is played on Radio One, and I stand by the radio listening – a disfigured beast finally unchained from the ocean floor."
"By the late summer of 1983 we are in Elephant Studios in Wapping recording our first LP."
"I am as useless as someone who has been left only as a head following a horrific road accident."
"The album ought to have been a dangerous blow from the buckle-end of a belt, but instead it is a peck on the cheek."
"The music always comes first – before lawyers and accountants – and I am suddenly bolder in demeanor."
"I am a puzzled child on the St Anne’s sands, shouting to sea-sounds of wave and gull."
"You either approve of violence or you don’t, and nothing on earth is more violent or extreme than the meat industry."
"The key to everything, Johnny finally made his first album."
"It is a paralyzing truth that once you enter the bullring of fame there is no one to help you."
"The press is in a world of its own, and you might add to it but you can’t disturb it."
"What registers is that I appear to be playing the naughtiness game, when, really, I am consumed with a question that is more difficult than it seems: what can I salvage from all of this?"
"In truth, the writer’s questions bore none of the intellectual swoop that his own typewriter later bestowed, and my real-time replies contained none of the stumble and fidget squirminess that journalistic license later decided they should have."
"Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory."
"His liking for male flesh gave the world a perfect excuse to brush him aside as a social danger, and he was erased away as someone who used his blackness as an excuse for everything."
"The essence of Smiths Art (MozArt) was the will to have every Smiths sleeve as well turned out as possible, and it came from an idea I had to take images that were the opposite of glamor and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power."
"Television still emits only the King’s English, which Manchester naturally dismembers by dropping any G that might be at the end of a word."
"No matter how high-speed the train, the frozen reflection in the window is the collapsed countenance of your own face staring back at you, unchanged with the fast-track passing of miles, questioning, questioning, questioning, like a second you – an inner you, representing the superiority of reason, reminding you that there is nowhere to run."
"If five Smiths albums enter the chart at number 2, what is stopping them from entering at number 1?"
"If I had felt that the Smiths’ demise had left me on the scaffold, then Johnny surely felt the same."
"‘I don’t want Stephen fuckin’ Street!’ she rattles. But with a bellowing sigh she took him on, and twenty-two years later she smiles: ‘I was offered a job lot.’"
"‘That was fucking awful,’ she says, and I drop the receiver on our relationship."
"‘Well,’ I begin, with postgraduate’s calm, and suddenly we are both deranged all over again."
"‘Don’t let your ego hurt people,’ shouts one security guard as I pass."
"‘I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside,’ I had sung in 1985."
"‘I didn’t ever want to go solo,’ I say, ‘I thought the Smiths would run for at least thirty albums.’"
"‘Is it having any effect?’ I ask a crew member from behind the iron curtain."
"‘I don’t exactly know why I’m here,’ I say softly, ‘on ... the planet ...’"
"‘We’ve nevah had anythung like thas be-fowah,’ says a police-woman."
"‘Oh, just write to me care of the management,’ he replies."
"I don’t know why you don’t do any Smiths songs. People want to hear them."
"Mick certainly saved Your Arsenal, and by extension he saved me."
"Ah, the greasy grind of the press – the scribblers and scratchers, the slingers and spillers."
"The sound coming from the speakers is the gift of life."
"Groups disband because they dry up; the Smiths broke up as their powers increased."
"It is a simple truth that everything in life ends badly."
"You begin to imagine facts where originally there were none."
"No matter how your new circumstances pad themselves out, the roots of your behavior patterns have already marked you out for slaughter."
"Violence is the ruling word in most persuasive human action."
"Everything I had said at the Smiths’ demise had led me directly towards trouble."
"Masculinity is marked out by a million intolerably exhaustive guidelines."
"Faulty emotional development can ripple like the sea."
"The abiding distinction of the Kray Brothers, for me, had nothing to do with their circle of violence, because that is nothing new or unusual."
"My days at Delresto, with Jake, with Arnold, free of the monastery – full of child-like forgetfulness – all come to a sudden end as night returns at last."
"Brute force and cruelty are entirely the point of the halls of justice, and fear is forever the key."
"All aspects of the outside world must be deemed negative in order to justify your reason for not joining it."
"Insanely, he elected to abandon the drums precisely at the moment when he had polished and refined his craft."
"The knowing grin was a bolt of lightning in ancient walks through pulpy woods."
"It was also Tim’s idea to contact the embalmed comic actor Charles Hawtrey to hopefully take part in the video for Everyday is like Sunday."
"You are obsessed with dead people," my father tells me, "you ought to get interested in the living."
"Like it or not, I remain the opposition – regardless of how the rules shift."
"How one record can occupy two positions must surely bend science sideways."
"Disowned, they must walk and walk until their legs give way to earth’s final pull – a feast for rats and buzzards."
"Every record booms to distortion, and the smell of machismo threatens to bosh a roving eye."
"The world is not ours. The earth is not ours."
"Alone, I left the court’s moldering walls. I left behind its odious gasses and I stepped out into new air."