Alfred Brendel Quotes

Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them.

Haldeman is the only man in America in this generation who let his hair grow for a courtroom appearance.

I'm not unusual; it's the others who are strange.

If anyone ever tells me something doesn't go together, it makes me want to try it.

I always like to do something different, something unusual, stray off the path a bit.

All I really want to do is things I haven't done. 'I'm gonna put a paper bag on my head and be on the cover of 'Billboard,' see what I can get away with - if they'll let me.' And they let me. And I am literally giggling inside for, like, a month that I got away with it.

Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?

If I dyed my hair, my mother would actually disown me.

It's important to do something outside the box, and maybe that'll inspire people do also do something outside the box.

Any time people are breaking outside the norm and playing something that isn't expected - that feels like punk to me.

... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader's experience and learning. That's much of the reason why the genre is so open to experimentation and innovation that other genres reject--strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it's still our staff of life.

Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.

You've got to know the rules to break them.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.

It's Wierd not to be Wierd.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

No one was normal, not really.

in this world there is only toleration for the so-called normal.

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance.

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

A saint has to be a misfit. A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or normal cannot be exemplary.

Anyone who is different or is slightly out of the norm, is considered crazy.