1980s Culture Quotes

I'm from the '80s, man. I got ideas; that's what we do.

There was a naive quality in 1982 around technology and the start of video games. And that's like the start of electronic music - there was this statement and, ideologically, these things to fight for.

And when I was a kid being an actor was not cool. I'm thirty now and when I was a kid in the 80s that wasn't a cool thing to be.

Growing up, I remember watching 'Little House on the Prairie' and 'L.A. Law' and being so obsessed with it.

I liked 'Repo Man.' Satire.

I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the '80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the 'Village Vanguard.'

I remember lying on the floor of my room, staring at a black-and-white television for most of the '80s - watching 'Diff'rent Strokes,' 'Facts of Life,' 'Silver Spoons,' Saturday morning cartoons, and 'Murder, She Wrote' while eating an insane amount of Stouffer's French bread pizza. I was sucked into it all.

I think the great thing about 'Ashes To Ashes' is that it is very much its own show.

I've quoted Lost in America several times.

Francis Coppola was very generous. We got paid a lot of money and he saw us every day, took us out every night. It was just a lot. Richard Gere was an absolute gentleman. Gregory Hines. You know, I worked with some giants and they were just so smooth. And it was the '80s. That's when people had a lot of money and it was okay to to hang out and be crazy.

I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.

I'm afraid that the passage of time is mostly lost on me. If you were to open up my head you would see that I'm still brooding about statements, songs and issues from the third grade. The years between 1980 and today went by very, very quickly.

I was just 13 when 'The Big Chill' was released in late September 1983, so I didn't catch all of its nuances when I sneaked into the theater to see it. But I could tell one thing for sure: These people were grown-ups.

It was a great time to grow up in Chicago. It was the mid-'80s, and we had the '85 Bears and the Michael Jordan era.

We are all a little bit hippy, a little bohemian. We take that from the culture we knew, from the '70s and the '80s.

I hated the '80s for years, and now I look back and think, actually, there was something really cool about it.

I was born in 1973, so I did not see 'Alien' when it was released theatrically. I saw 'Alien' when it was on Home Box Office. I think I was probably 10.

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.

Back in the day, years ago, in 1988, the only TV I watched was 'Doctor Who' because I had children and two full-time jobs, and 'Doctor Who' was the exact length of time it took to do my nails, so I would watch 'Doctor Who' once a week!

For me, the best high school movie is, like, 'Fast Times' and what Cameron Crowe is like.

When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.

I was very surprised how many people were earnestly reminiscing about the '80s. It's such a stupid thing to do, like, to be honestly invested in nostalgia. It never even occurred to me to do that.

I grew up at a time with androgyny in the 1980s; it was easy to pass under the radar as a gay may.

I first read 'The Scarlet Letter' when I was fifteen. In it, I found a familiar vision of religious intolerance to the one around me. I grew up in the 1980s, when televangelists, with their fluffed up hair and their tears, self-righteously denounced all kinds of sinners, reserving a special, full-throated enthusiasm for gay people.

When I started doing stand-up in the late eighties, that was not an uncommon thing, that people dressed for the stage. I've seen that change as time has gone by to where, for me, it's something that people remark on. And that's when I started to really embrace it in a way and get more flamboyant and foppish with the way that I dress.