Showing posts with label the smiths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the smiths. Show all posts

Monday, 10 May 2010

“Well, I am an extremely beautiful person.”

Morrissey. What a beautiful man. I adore him, I really do. I am probably the only person on the planet who finds him sexier now than when he was younger (he's got that sort of distinguished gentleman thing going for him, even though he's a super-vegan weirdo). I love his voice. I love how sarcastic he is. I love everything he says.

So in honour of that, I'm going to post a selection of a few of my favourite Morrissey quotes. NME.com did a feature on this a few months ago, which is where I got these from, but even if you're not a Morrissey fan, I think you'll enjoy these.

“Age shouldn’t affect you. You’re either marvellous or you’re boring, regardless of your age.”

“I do maintain that if your hair is wrong, your entire life is wrong.”

“I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke.”

“Whenever I go past Mcdonalds I get very, very angry.”

“I am capable of looking on the bright side - I just don’t do it very often.”

“Doing nothing gives me great pleasure. And believe me, I succeed wonderfully in it.”

“Life would be so colourful if only I had a drink problem.”

“Long hair is an unpardonable offense which should be punishable by death.”

“Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Band Aid was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.”

“When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.”

“I think I must be, absolutely, a total sex object. In every sense of the word.”

“I have seen one or two psychiatrists. They just sit and nod and doodle.”

“[Dance music is] the refuge for the mentally deficient. It's made by dull people for dull people.”

“I'm just happy being dumpy. Dumpy, fat and middle-aged.”

“I'm not very good at being dull.”

“Yes I have had a tan, actually. I went to Los Angeles and got one there, but it didn't make it back to Britain. You're not allowed to come through customs with a tan.”

“I lie a lot - it's really useful.”

“He referred to me as an 'insufferable puffed-up prat'. This is a bit rich coming from a man who actually married his own mother.”

“I'm dramatically underexposed. I demand more attention!”

“I've always assumed there's a dark river flowing beneath my fans' desires.”

“[Sigmund Freud] just made people feel so neurotic about their lives. I mean, if you dreamt about a lampshade, it meant you wanted to be whipped by the local vicar or something.”

“In England, pop music seems now to be exclusively for children. If an artist is no good, why is it necessary to have that artist repeatedly rammed in our face?”

“Don't talk to me about people who are 'nice' cause I have spent my whole life in ruins because of people who are 'nice'.”

“What's the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning? Wish I hadn't.”

“Artists aren't really people. I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache.”

“I do think it's possible to go through life and never fall in love, or find someone who loves you.”

“I normally live in Los Angeles - if you can call it normal living.”

“I've never intended to be controversial but it's very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.”

“My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.”

“That was the problem with the 'celibate' word because they don't consider for a moment that you'd rather not be, but you just are. I was never a sexual person.”

“I lost myself to music at a very early age, and I remained there.”

"Robert Smith is a whingebag."

“Music is like a drug, but there are no rehabilitation centres.”

“I just feel that when all is said and done, I am not insane.”

"Sometimes I wish I was just a simple drunkard."

“When they bury me in a church and chuck earth on my grave, I’d like the words ‘Well, at least he tried’ engraved on my tombstone.”

Friday, 23 April 2010

Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.

Ok, so I know that style blogs are the only blogs that ever get any kind of following, or ever really have anyone read them, but I'm using this to write down some of the things that I think (because, basically, nobody else will listen). Maybe every now and again a stranger will stumble across this and decide to read a paragraph or two, and maybe it will make them think about something a little different. Or maybe not.

The book that I just finished, Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland, was magnificent. For someone like me, who reads three books a week, to really be affected by something, is rare and really a special thing. Yeah, so it could have been 200 pages longer if only Coupland had been bothered to flesh things out a bit more. The characters could have talked more like real people rather than cliches. But the concept - the plot and ideas and questions in the story- was fabulous.


I'm not certain that I've ever finished a book with so many new ideas in my head. I'm not sure that I've ever questioned my own ideals the way I did when I finished Girlfriend in a Coma. It was sort of mindblowing. Beautiful, so sad, but mindblowing.


If you can get your hands on a copy of this book, please do. Read it. Appreciate it. It's only short; it's not complicated or full of obnoxious, pompous language. The questions it poses resonate more soundly now than they could have done when it was published 12 years ago. And they will keep resonating until something is done.

A few of my favourite quotes:

- Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.

- At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

- Nobody believes the identites we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

- If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.

(P.S. The Smiths song of the same name is also beautiful.)