Lynne Reid Banks Quotes

My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.

I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.'

Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.

But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I'm very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

In the end, punk inevitably burned itself out and acted as a bridge across which the New Romantics could sashay in their chiffon and glossy hair.

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.

In the '50s, a lot of stories were built around radiation and the proliferation of new technology. In the '70s, there were a lot of stories that dealt with the Vietnam War. So comic books have always been a reflection of the times we live in.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

'Animal House' was sort of the first real, contemporary, youthful voice of the baby boom generation. It spoke to that audience, and it spoke to that part of me which was saying, 'Out with the old, in with the new.'

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren't individual to myself.

The '60s is such an explosive period. It was very interesting for me because I grew up in Canada, and obviously, I know some American history because I've lived here for many years, and even in Canada, that does permeate.

I thought the 60s in London was normal, so when it stopped it was a shock.

What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

The fifties were when people started coming down on "juvenile delinquents," "hoodlums," "vandals"--anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

I was very, very lucky to spend my youth during the '60s.

I knew some people at my school who were squatters, and my younger brother was a squatter. I knew those guys: those were the people who said the Russians were the good guys and the Americans were bad. But I was the guy who went to the disco.