Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Everything's always about being homogenized and following in a group. The people who stand out always have the most problems.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.

I'm appealing to people who want something different, but the world, on the whole, doesn't really embrace different things. Not on the whole.

I just don't conform very well.

I didn't rebel in the way a lot of people do.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints - the sinners are much more fun.

All the things that people like me supposedly don't do, I do.

I wish I were kind of normal. It would be so much more simple.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

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

I never thought I was normal, never tried to be normal.

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 just get really bored with sticking to the norm and having the proper conservative image. That's just so not me.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

I've worked so hard to eliminate the inner geek from my life. I suddenly realize I have no patience for those people who still have their geeks showing. Now I see why being 'normal' has been so important to me.

Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.

I feel kind of like the black sheep in Congress, but here I am.

That's a difficult question, because to consider yourself a rebel is sort of ridiculous.

It was not a good thing in my family to be a 'personality.'

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

I was a troublemaker. For a long time, I didn't fit in.