Justin Townes Earle Quotes

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

If I were like your mother, I would be a woman.

It's funny 'cos I think a lot about kids who grow up with their parents being really important members of their fields, and they just go the opposite way.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

You gotta understand, there are two different kinds of Asians - the kind who are good at school, obey their parents, go to college - that kind of stuff. And then you have my family - me, my brother, all of my cousins - we're just wretched people.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels? That's the age-old question. I guess I could have by not going into the arts, but the thing is, I couldn't do anything else.

I'm very conventional compared to my parents.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

Some people look gender non-conforming because they want to look that way - they don't want to conform to society's expectations.

I'm very different to my mum. I'm not as beautiful as she is, nor - she probably despairs about this - as groomed. I certainly rebelled against her idea of looking well turned-out. I spent several years with a shaved head in jeans and baggy shirts.

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person. Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anything I could, getting suspended from school, going on demonstrations. I was a pretty difficult teenager.

I'm of the establishment but anti-establishment.

I didn't want to look distinguished; I wanted to look fun, and also to fade into the street, into the King's Road. If I don't fade into a room at White's, that's fine. My father was chairman of Brooks' and the Beefsteak, and I was brought up in that life, and it bores me rigid.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

I just felt like I was making people angry because I wouldn't wear the frilly bows.

In real life, my parents pretty much approved of all my boyfriends. I guess I was doing something wrong. I should have been more rebellious.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

I was born in Paris in 1950. I had a strict upper-class Catholic education but I never really fitted in the system and revolted against it quite early.

I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.

I didn't try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

Rather be dead than cool.