Lester Bangs Quotes

When you get together in a group, it becomes like a family, with the different personalities and the politics that comes with being in a band. It's different than bringing something in by yourself.

School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

I like myself. I think I'm cool. But I think when you're in a band you take on a role within the band, and I think people over the course of years can identify those roles as almost being bigger than just the individual. I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about.

Look, not everybody plays well with each other on the playground. I get that, that's politics.

I think that the climate within the band has changed, it's now in a more functional situation.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

When people ask what I'd like to do next, the answer is usually, 'Something with people in rooms.'

I'm terrible at collaborating with people; nothing ever ends up coming out good.

The associations inside the group become more important than those outside.

I think, a lot of times, that's why groups break-up, because people lose their individuality.

Being in a group, you don't really get to give an ounce of who you are as a solo artist.

I have a real hard time with inter-personal relationships. I find it really taxing. Especially, like, friendships and being in bands.

It's all realistic, if you get a group of ladies and you stick them together almost every day for three, four months you're going to have some catfights.

Usually when you put five girls together, especially when they've been solo artists, it doesn't turn out very well.

If you do not know each player individually, one on one, it is impossible to form a team from 22 distinct personalities, different languages, different home countries, but with one common aim.

When you're working with an ensemble, I think you really need different energies because you don't have much time with each character to make them feel real. You want strong personalities that are very different.

I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I've been around clubhouses a long time, I know how to maneuver around the clubhouse.

I think that's what I learned a lot from Odd Future. I learned a lot of great things from them, but one of the mistakes that they made was that we didn't stay together, and we didn't communicate. We never had meetings. Everybody had issues with everybody else and wouldn't talk about it.

There is a lot of energy between Lars and James, and sometimes that energy can erupt. I know that before I was in the band, Kirk was the guy who was often in the middle, and it was important at that time. And now I feel like sometimes I'm the guy that's in the middle between not just James and Lars, but even Kirk.

Half the point of education is to build peer groups and social bonds.

For me, I always considered that a group is above everything else.

There's a momentum to being committed to a group that you think is good, and there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make your choice a good choice.

One thing that I've noticed about big families is that they usually break down into two camps: the talkers and the watchers.