Edward Ruscha Quotes

I have always been mainstream. It's so weird, because I don't see it as something negative at all. So many people see it as something negative.

conformity has been a devastating thing. Its ill effects continue right to this day. Customers still look at the woman in the next chair and say, 'I'll have what she has.' That's all right for ordering at a restaurant - but not in a beauty parlor.

It's true that people were told facial hair was not appreciated by the British public, but I just decided to keep the moustache.

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

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

I'll never have a wedding. I don't want to marry just to do what everybody else is doing.

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

I don't believe in societal restrictions. It wasn't a choice - conformity simply never occurred to me.

Pop music allows you to be who you are without having to wear a social uniform or to conform, which some people find impossible to do.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

It is interesting to break all the rules. I'm not married, I have a baby, and it feels infinitely more right.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S.

I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don't tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.

The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

Most Americans never work as hard as when they're trying to appear normal, and in New Orleans, we just don't bother with that.

Being married and having a child was not something I wanted, and I knew that at a very young age. I tend to be more solitary, and I'm truly a free spirit.

When you buy into the cultural idea of what's acceptable and unacceptable, you reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices. That wouldn't work for me. I don't love to give advice to anyone, because we all have to make our own choices, but I'd want to live my life in truth.

My family all thought I was a little nuts.

There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'

I have a friend who only buttons the bottom button of his suit jacket, which you're not supposed to do. 'Supposed to do.' But it's his thing, and it's his personal style, and it's like you've got to honor that. People can do whatever they want.

We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.