Ad-Rock Quotes

Personally, I am stuck with one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

People are always talking about the old days. They say that the old movies were better, that the old actors were so great. But I don't think so. All I can say about the old days is that they have passed.

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

It's always refreshing to step into another time.

I don't connect much with the present. I have more of an affinity for what came in the past.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger.

I spend a lot of time in the future, But to help the future, sometimes you got to go back to the past, and sometimes you got to stay in the present.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

It's always a fun game to go back and guess what long-past people would think.

I got the best of Rod. And I am fully aware that, even though I love listening to his stories of the crazy days, no relationship could really last then. I sometimes wish I could go back in time to the 1970s or 1980s, sit at a bar, and observe him, but I'm glad our time came when it did.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that's such a way of diminishing the present. And it's hard to live like that.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

I'm not one of those kind of people that likes to beat up the past to validate the present. Certain people think that it's cool to make fun of MC Hammer. I'm like, 'Yeah, but you owned all of his records.'

Time travel is a fantasy we all have. The 'Back to the Future' series really exploits that wish.

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

As both a student of history and a man devoted to living in the present, I admit that I do not spend a lot of time imagining how things might otherwise have been. But I do like to think there is a difference between being resigned to a situation and reconciled to it.

I grew up in Le Mars, Iowa, and even though it's a great place to grow up and be raised as a kid, there wasn't a lot to do. It was fairly boring, and I think the way I either escaped the boredom or found a way to keep myself occupied was through movies and TV shows.

If you are always talking about the past, then you don't really have much in the present.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.