Shane MacGowan Quotes

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand. I want to try to explain what the 1930s - the golden age of Hollywood - was truly like. People forget that America was such a different place then, not yet the dominant force in the world.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age.

I used to love the '20s.

I think I'd just like to get in a time machine and travel and never come back. The '20s would be an incredible place to be, dressing up in tuxedos with fancy cars. That sounds incredible.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties - with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby,' and the pre-Code films - as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.

I love that sort of 1930s and 1940s; I love that period - the thought of it. And I like war movies and all that kind of stuff as well.

One of my favorite movies is 'Some Like It Hot,' which isn't really a musical, but I'm just such a sucker for old movies. I wouldn't want to ever tarnish one of them, or do a spot-on remake, but just do something light like that where I get to glide across the floor. I would be a very happy camper.

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.

This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.

Age is not enviable in America. It's not applauded all that strongly. You have to take it all with a grain of salt.

My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

I'm eighty-three and homeless. It was the same when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was "Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?" That what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now? I've wondered where home is. It's when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

There's a lot more future in hamburgers than in baseball.

Suppose there aren't any more A + days once you get to be twelve? Wouldn't that be something! To spend the rest of your life looking for an A + day and not finding it.

When I was Younger, I wanted to be something.Now, I just want to be younger.

I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

You know, I wish I wasn't so young when I made some of my movies, because I thought that's what the rest of my life was going to be like and I'd have all the time in the world to enjoy it. It wasn't and I didn't.

The Golden Age was never the present age.