Chris Matthews Quotes

When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Elvis was the only man from Northeast Mississippi who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops, and hippies.

The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.

It's really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70's. I wish there would be one big change like that again, but I don't know if that'll ever happen.

The idea of the peace movement and of people who spent their entire lives trying to have a more egalitarian, just society, suddenly became swamped by the record industry, by the new rock and roll culture, and by the idea of not trusting anyone over thirty.

The Stones were more dangerous than other bands of the Sixties. It looked like they had more fun than the Beatles - like they stayed up later.

'Ghoul' was what my world looked like, growing up in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and what I thought it looked like. A lot of my personal experiences went into it.

People are very appreciative, and I'm always thrilled at how long the 'Morse' films have lasted. They seem to have an afterlife that goes on and on for decades, which is touching.

It is very difficult to capture over the centuries, the charisma of an individual.

I had this image before Boy George, before the Beatles, before the Rolling Stones.

Elvis is great and so is anybody who lasts like he does.

The new generation doesn't know anything about me except for what they saw in' Easy Rider.'

'Animal House' was sort of the first real, contemporary, youthful voice of the baby boom generation. It spoke to that audience, and it spoke to that part of me which was saying, 'Out with the old, in with the new.'

I've always felt like if I was going to be born any other time that it would be during the '60s or definitely during Woodstock.

Anyway, you know, when Richard Meltzer said rock and roll died in '68, what he means is Jefferson Airplane were no longer his buddies, that's what he really means. He means it in a political way: that was when the artists and the audience found themselves on different levels.

Things were so much better in the 1970s, when I was a young women undergraduate at Yale. I am grateful to have come of age during that period.

I gotta tell you, Rickey Medlocke lived in some of the most magical years in this world's history. I lived in the '60s. I lived in the '70s, right into the '80s, and man, it was bad to the bone.

Stuart was a very special person and he was miles ahead of everybody. You know as far as intelligent and artistic feelings are concerned, he was miles ahead. So I learned a lot from him and because in the '60s we had a very strange attitude towards being young, towards sex, towards everything.

All the best times in music were rebellious. I mean, even like Elvis, people didn't want their daughters paying attention to him. He was considered too sexual!

1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies.

Well all of Chuck's children are out there playing his licks, get into your kicks. Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets.