Richard Coles Quotes

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn't weird at all and it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.

I've worked so hard to eliminate the inner geek from my life. I suddenly realize I have no patience for those people who still have their geeks showing. Now I see why being 'normal' has been so important to me.

It’s not the mainstream. It’s just the status quo.

I always felt like reality was a bizarre place, and everybody was really good at being normal, and I didn't know how to do it.

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.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

Not everybody needs to be a weirdo.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could've happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was 'normal'".

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

People want you to be ordinary.

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

I was always the squarest person in the cool room, and alternatively, sometimes the weirder person at the mainstream table.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts - and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?

Anyone who is different or is slightly out of the norm, is considered crazy.

Didn't this beat everything? A pretty and an ugly taking a stroll together. The warden came closer, confusion all over his middle-pretty face. Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "Make me pretty.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.

I had a lot of anger against the way things 'should be done' - conforming to social norms, ticking boxes to gain acceptance. Frustration at the pointlessness and predictability of smalltalk. Oh and a lot of anger about tea, which the British seem to use to avoid actually saying anything.

Custom is almost a second nature.