Joe Strummer Quotes

The idea for 'Lifestyles' began to take shape in my mind as I became more and more frustrated with the type of celebrity interviews I was doing for television.

My mom is one of those really angry moms who gets mad at absolutely everything. Once when I was a little kid, I accidentally knocked a Flintstones glass off the kitchen table. She said, 'Well, dammit, we can't have nice things.'

Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in? That village, that city, that life? We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

How I hate everything!

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.

Much more devastating than frustration is the emotion of disappointment.

[Rejection] made me quit writing once. For six months. I started up again when my then seven-year-old son asked me to start writing again because I was too grumpy when I wasn't writing.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

I've gotten to the point I won't even watch the 11 o'clock news. You just walk away from it thinking how bad everything is.

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution.

Since I was born I wanted to entertain and communicate. I wanted to communicate so badly ... My sixth-grade math teacher taped my mouth. I'm still out to get her [for that]. It was very traumatizing!

Expectations are resentment waiting to happen.

I'm disappointed in people in general.

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

If we haven't a grouch against Fortune, we seem unable to avoid one against ourselves.

If I can entertain people and get them to open up a little bit, then they're much more conducive to any ideas I might have, whether they're about relationships or politics. The most interesting songs, I think, are the ones where the two overlap.

I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America.

I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.

So it's nice to know that Rita had that impact, and it was nice to end a character on a high note like that. But, again, in the moment... I always say, nobody was more devastated than me [from Rita's death in Dexter]!

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

I'm tired of being a nice guy, I've been poor all my life, but don't know quite why.

If they'd been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased-all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can't scratch.

I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.