Stephen Malkmus Quotes

At 18, I was attracted to bad boys.

I was never a rah-rah person. I never sold drugs or did anything crazy.

I think that what I'm attracted to is people who are wild. But the self-destructive side comes out of the wild side. The wildness is very different from me. That's why I think I like it.

I think I'm trouble-adjacent. I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like. I skirted the stuff that other kids were doing because the idea of actually getting in trouble was not appealing to me, but I still wanted to have adventures.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.

The bad boy: always more fun.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

Drugs, sex, booze, all the stuff that we wanted to do. The problem was that we didn't want to learn the top 40 'cause most of the music was awful and we had this other idea about what we wanted to do.

I suppose women are attracted to the bad-boy image sometimes because it's fun to have an adventure. It's like eating junk food... it's fun at the time, but ultimately not the best choice.

Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

Ignoring fame was my rebellion, in a funny way. I was insistent on being normal and doing normal things. It probably wasn't advisable to go to college in America and room with a complete stranger. And it probably wasn't wise to share a bathroom with eight other people in a coed dorm. Looking back, that was crazy.

Sometimes people like the bad boy.

I'm really attracted to anti-heroes, and I'm a little bit of a troublemaker myself, and a little bit of a rule-breaker, and I like spies.

I did fine in school. School was cool until I started personally rebelling.

It's funny because there's a part of me that, if something is popular, I sort of become a defiant teenager about it. Like, 'Oh, I'm not gonna like that because everybody likes it.'

I'm just not very rock n' roll.

Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?

To me, the punk rock kids I grew up with were really, really smart, and to me, respecting those kids was a really big deal.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

I'm for everybody. There are no set rules. But if one's not a joiner. To hell with all of them!

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.