Lou Reed Quotes

I've never been up with the times, always been slightly out of step.

Somehow I wasn't completely crucified by the critics. I don't know how or why, I probably should've been.

I'm going to do everything I can to keep from being mainstream.

I'm somebody who doesn't believe in conforming to maybe whatever is on the radio.

I march to a different drummer, whose location, identity, and musical training haven't yet been established.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

You don't accomplish much by swimming with the mainstream. Hell, a dead fish can do that.

In my heart I'm independent, a bit of a rebel, a nonconformist.

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

I learned the word non-conformist in fourth grade and immediately announced that I would grow up to become one.

In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.

He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.

I do things in my own way, but I've never felt any need to rebel.

I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.

I didn't set out to be unusual or different. I just wanted to do things my way.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

People made suggestions, but, hell, I don't actually listen to anybody, I just go my own way.

Following what everyone else is doing is rarely a way to get rich.

Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

I definitely didn't fit in perfectly to the school system. I was raised with such freedom of speech and thinking.

You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

There's always gonna be criticisms, no matter what movie you do, no matter what. You can't please everybody, and it doesn't matter what the genre is. There's always gonna be a positive to a negative comment.