John Cooper Clarke Quotes

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

I left home when I was 16 because I was looking for adventure.

I've lived in England, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany in the '80s. I don't like being settled. It's not really healthy.

I have built my life to pursue the new. I don't have family, don't know many people and I am usually ready to leave within an hour.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

I think a lot of nice things happen when you're driving, or when you're on a plane, or whatever. There's a certain freedom that comes along with motion.

I can only go places because I know that I can go away from them, if that makes sense. I like the gypsy lifestyle that filming affords.

I haven't found anywhere in the world where I want to be all the time. The best of my life is the moving. I look forward to going.

All my life I have been a nomad.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets [rents] it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

I love being on the road. I sit at home too long, and I start to go a bit stir crazy.

I am nomadic by nature.

I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.

All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn't a proper place. I like in betweens.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away...

I'm kind of addicted to moving.

The world is my workshop. It is not my home.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

I've lived a very nomadic life, which I enjoy.