Henry Rollins Quotes

I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.

I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I'm 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.

I'm really enjoying living in Los Angeles. It's a great city to live in. I'm living a very suburban domesticated lifestyle out there - a two bedroomed little bungalow with two cars, and we're just driving around, going to meetings here and there - it's lovely!

Industrialization divorces the family from society. The place of business moves away from the place of residence: the father goes to work in the plant or in the office, miles away from the home. Wife and children are no longer integrated into the productive work. They may, indeed, have their own jobs and go to work themselves; but even if they should work in the same plant or the same office as the man of the family, they do not work as a family unit.

We city dwellers, we residents of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, are for the most part urbanized to some extent. We know deadlines, start times and traffic.

I lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and in a lot of ways, I felt like I lived in my car.

If Oasis is the sound of a council estate singing its heart out, then the Libertines sounded like someone just putting something in the rubbish chute at the back of the estate, trying to work out what day it is.

I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where people are in cars.

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

Your job as an executive is to edit, not write. It's OK to write once in a while but if you do it often there's a fundamental problem with the team. Every time you do something ask if you're writing or editing and get in the mode of editing.

Uptown living, you've got to call 911. Where I am, I am 911.

I made a career goals list for 2017 and it's so funny. I have low self-esteem or something, so I put both wishes and goals. The goals were things I'm going to do anyway, because I have no choice because my job is to do stand-up comedy so I have to tour and I have to write stuff. The wishes were all things that could be goals. As in, I bet people who have achieved these things called them goals at one point. But I haven't looked at that piece of paper since.

I took part in a theatre festival in Massachusetts two summers after I graduated from college. Then I was in Los Angeles thinking: "I'm going to go to New York." I'd decided that I would not have a chance of a film career, so I was about to make the move. I bought a plane ticket and found a place to live in New York, packed my bags and of course the universe "told me" that I was not meant to go. Suddenly, a week before I was supposed to leave, I had three job offers and one of them was my first movie.

I let the music set the tone of the lyrics.I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost.

I write a little bit about what it's like to be a female boss in my book [ Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?] and the things I've noticed about that, but by and large, it's just a tough job in general.

[Bill Clinton] was the man, as a matter of fact, who, in terms of the Communications Decency Act, which would have made the Internet, the whole concept of cyberspace, vulnerable to rampant censorship - he pushed that bill, and I know the man in the Justice Department whom he persuaded - the guy didn't want to lose his job - to write the bill.

Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.

You look at the inner cities and you see bad education, no jobs, no safety. You walk to the grocery store with your child and you get shot. You walk outside to look and see what's happening, and you get shot. In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. I am not going to let that happen.

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

My first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.

I made a handshake agreement with my best friend in college, Michael Shamberg, who is now a movie producer. We used to write shows together, and we said, "Let's only do what's fun. Let's never take a job where we have to dress up in a suit."

Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.