John Oates Quotes

Having a mustache and never smiling became a permanent component of my persona through the quaintly self-important decade of the seventies.

A mustache really defines your face. My dad had a mustache when I was growing up, and I can still remember when he shaved it, he looked like a completely different person.

Over my lifetime, the car had actually transcended the fact that it is a car. It has become a venue.

In general, costumes are the first thing in life that let other people know who we are. They indicate who the person is without saying anything.

Ball caps travel far and wide. They do far more than keep the sun out of your eyes or the cold off your head. Ball caps are a statement.

I feel like I was supposed to be born in the '90s. Everything from that era needs to come back.

The 80s was an outstanding era.

My brother had a mustache, and when my brother had a mustache, it was cool. When I had a mustache, everyone just assumed I'm an immigrant and I don't speak English, which is fascinating. It was a fascinating thing to discover how I looked versus my brother with a mustache.

The personal pronoun "I" should be the coat of arms of some individuals.

We are what we wear, we wear what we are

Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.

Clothes are not so much about who you are as who you want to be.

Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.

I dislike the idea of jewellery being like a price tag around someone's neck. It needs to be something else - and there is something extremely magical about armour.

I'm proud to be a symbol like the army knife or the mountains.

I look at the past and I see myself.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

A name is so important. A surname connects you to your past, to your family. Even a given name has meaning - why did your parents pick that particular one?

Oh, both my shoes are shiny new, And pristine is my hat My dress is 1922… My life is all like that.

Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Dad once said to me that should he pass away, if there was some way of letting me know he was going to be ok - that we were all going to be ok - the message would come to me in the form of a white feather. Then something happened to me about ten years ago when I was on tour in Australia. I was presented with a white feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder, which definitely took my breath away. One thing for sure is that the white feather has always represented peace to me.

Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.

He...boasted an unassuming mustache, which was perched atop his upper lip cautiously, as though it were slightly embarrassed to be there and would like to slide away and become a sideburn or something more fashionable.