P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

The only thing I use the Rolling Stone for is toilet paper when I run out.

I welcome all interviews with 'Rolling Stone' magazine, and I'm sure people will talk to me in the future.

I wanted to be in Rolling Stone number two with a tomorrow feel to it, like an experimental Rolling Stones with Jagger singing.

Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.

My first real writing job was at 'Rolling Stone,' so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism.

My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio - pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a canonizing institution. Jann Wenner has worked to make Rolling Stone the keeper of the canon since 1970. I don't like that, because he uses institutional power and he uses economic power to enforce those standards.

Our interest in 'Rolling Stone' is driven by its people, its cultural significance, and the globally recognized brand that has no peer in its areas of influence.

I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, 'Bob [Dylan] is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, 'No, thanks. The piece is over.'

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn't want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people's lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.

It was like treading water all through the '60s, and when 1970 kicked in, I thought "We're here. Right." God, this is exciting. I'm going to go for it now. I really felt it was my time. Then Marc Bolan did it first. That really pissed me off.

You can fool some of the people part of the time in a rock and roll song, fifty million Elvis Presley fans can't be all wrong.

In dealing with the press, do yourself a favor, stick with one of three responses: (a) I know and I can tell you; (b) I know and I can't tell you; (c) I don't know.

Jim Dean and Elvis were the spokesmen for an entire generation. When I was in acting school in New York, years ago, there was a saying that if Marlon Brando changed the way people acted, then James Dean changed the way people lived. He was the greatest actor who ever lived. He was simply a genius.

I doubt that I am the first member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won't be the last.

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has confessed that until recently, he thought the 16-year-old fellow tween idol [Justin Bieber] was a female. 'I only heard Justin Bieber for the first time two weeks ago. I genuinely thought it was a woman singing. I'd never heard it before. Is it big in England yet?'

I suppose the biggest change to me is this kind of very oversexualizing of everything. Not that anyone wants to take the sex out of rock 'n' roll, you know - that would be ludicrous - but it seems that everything now, it's like the sexuality is the only voice; everything else is gone.

We was on our way to fame, got matching suits and Beatle boots.

This is serious business, sex, violence, and rock and roll.

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

I enjoy the press. I understand their business.

There are certain times you rattle the press's cages, and other times you don't, and you have to be discerning about it.

Around the time the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, I was already in a band.

When you're talking to the media, be a well, not a fountain.