Aaron Allston Quotes

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.

I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.

Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against.

You gotta understand, there are two different kinds of Asians - the kind who are good at school, obey their parents, go to college - that kind of stuff. And then you have my family - me, my brother, all of my cousins - we're just wretched people.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married. I'm not interested in being hip.

When I first read 'On the Road,' it helped me figure out how to live against the grain. Now I wonder how to be subversive when the subversive has become mainstream.

All the things that people like me supposedly don't do, I do.

Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight A student?

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions.

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

Conforming is not cool.

Conventionality is not morality.

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

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

We're the acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

It’s not the mainstream. It’s just the status quo.

Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

You ask me, brother, why am I in here. Brother, why are you not in here?

It is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.