Johnny Marr Quotes

I went to art school in the days when it was what you did if you didn't want to be like everybody else. You wanted to be strange and different, and art school encouraged that. We hated the drama students - they were guys with pipes and cardigans.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

It's like, you can't have any fun, and if you do have fun, if you do your own thing, you're considered crazy and should be in a mental institution. Now, that's what I find creepy. I'm eccentric. I am not messed up.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

I wasn't, you know, Mr. Popular. I was somewhere in the middle ground. I was quite alternative, the things I liked to do. Skateboarding, at the time. Playing in a band as opposed to playing in the rugby team. You know, that kind of thing.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

It wasn't so much of a controlled effort to end up as part of the Goth scene.

I grew up in the Bible Belt and I made my own clothes and dyed my hair purple. Nobody ever knew what to do with me.

I know I'm never going to be a big pop star, because I'm not willing to conform.

When you're young, it's all about the society of school and being cool, but they don't understand that somebody can be different and live a different lifestyle and still be a regular person. I was the same way when I was a kid.

When you're younger, it's all about conformity and being easily influenced - especially in terms of fashion. You just follow the trends. Whatever is hot at the moment, you want to get it. You basically just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. But as you get older, those things aren't as important.

I will always consider myself a punk because of those experiences in high school. It will always be a part of me.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

My friends and me, we're the type that don't care. We're not into fashion. That's, like, millennial spirit.

I was a bit of a loner at school because I was into what I was into, that sort of scene; that is where the whole mod thing started, when I was 14-15.

It's like our little thing: you can take the girl out of the punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl.

For years, young adults have adopted extremely liberal world views in their attempts to be different, ultimately failing to see the irony that they've all become the same.

When I was growing up, you had to conform and do the same thing that everyone else was doing. I would just go home and make music and be able to make myself happy, but I know that's more of a challenge for some people.

They said my friends were just an unruly mob, and I should get a hair cut and get a new job.

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.

I've always straddled a weird line - there's a lot of mainstream stuff that I love. At the same, I still feel like an outsider. I'm the outsider who's on the inside.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

I've seen a lot of good things and a lot of the bad of what Hollywood can bring. At the end of the day, I've found that when you try and fit in, that's a way to go crazy; you kind of lose yourself. I'm sometimes the different one at the table, but I don't care.

I was just, as a child, very different from the others, and didn't really care what they thought because you know, a child doesn't really have inhibitions; you sort of gain your inhibitions later.

Yeah, but if you're not doing what everyone else is doing then you're going to be misunderstood. People are going to wonder why you're trying to be different; it's just a natural instinct.