Shirley Manson Quotes

I grew up in Northern California, so the hippies were still around. My father and mother were very Republican, very strait-laced and very uptight, but my uncles were hippies.

To be with the others, you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we're trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean?

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.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

My dad doesn't get any of my jokes. He laughs at them, but he doesn't understand them. He's just laughing because people around him are laughing.

Everyone was wearing jeans, so I started wearing slacks. I'd walk on, and people would laugh before I got to the mic because I looked stupid.

It depends on who you talk to if I'm part of the establishment or part of the antiestablishment.

Queering don't make the world work.

I'm not a blender. I don't like people who blend into society.

I don't care what other people think. I hate conforming, that you have to wear this to a business meeting or that to a dinner. I've never worked that way.

I'm definitely not a rebel.

My parents aren't really conformists.

It's not that I take pride in being unfashionable. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

What we didn't realize then - and one of the many things Timothy Leary was wrong about - is that when you drop out, you inevitably also drop in.

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

I want to be sure I'm being myself. I don't want to follow something because someone's like 'do this, it's popular.'

It's easy to think you have to fit some kind of mold.

I've got two very sophisticated daughters who'd rather die than see their dad in a technicoloured knitted jacket.

I didn't do anything with the thought that I want to go against society or bend any rules.

I was probably the only kid in school that had long hair.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

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.

My dad wears girls' clothes - it's so funny. Sometimes I see him and I'm like, 'Nice shirt!,' because it's from my closet.

I don't have any desire to rebel and be something totally different from what I am.