Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

I've never been a mainstream kind of guy.

I wasn't, you know, Mr. Popular. I was somewhere in the middle ground. I was quite alternative, the things I liked to do. Skateboarding, at the time. Playing in a band as opposed to playing in the rugby team. You know, that kind of thing.

I grew up in the Bible Belt and I made my own clothes and dyed my hair purple. Nobody ever knew what to do with me.

I'm a bit of a rebel, and I always will be.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

I'm never really going to be the normal teenager.

When I was a kid in the '50s, I was very enamored of beatniks and... a kind of dark sensibility.

I have what some people consider to be a 'hippie' mentality.

I always related most to Steve McQueen because he was more of an outcast than Robert Redford or Paul Newman.

When I was in my teens and twenties, I could see friends expressing how radical they were, and I envied them, the way they lived, the way they dressed. Maybe there is a part of me that is reserved, even in rebellion.

I was such a punk.

The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool - as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.

People call me wild. Not really though, I'm not. I guess I've never been normal, not what you call Establishment. I'm country.

I should be so lucky to be a misfit. I aspire to be a misfit.

I was never really a Mod. I thought I was more of a beatnik with the brown corduroy jacket, blue jeans, etc. I loved the music Mods liked, and I loved the clothes, but I didn't have any money to spend on them.

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

The biggest misconception about me is the bad-boy image that everyone stuck me into due to my tattoos, drug days and the constant changes I make with my hair color.

I am a bit of a bad boy. I have tattoos and I mess around. That's part of my image, so it's cool.

I hate the word 'hippy'. I hate a lot of people, and hippies don't do that!

I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along.

I guess I was always an outsider and some kind of anarchist.

I always go for the underdog or the rogue or the rebel.

I was always interested in the fringes of culture and society and in expressing myself in a distinctively different way, like always rooting for the underdog, that kind of thing.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.