Cultural Rebellion Quotes

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

My grandma was very traditional, but she herself is a rebel of that culture.

'Faces' became more than a film. It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can't be done in America, that can't be done without money.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.

My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.

I was raised on GG Allen, Divine, Elvira and Marilyn Manson. I was always more interested in those button pushing, transgressive artists and they made a lot of good money doing it.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

When you come from a family of communists and you go through your teenage rebellion, what's the best way of rebelling from a family of communists? Well, I put on a suit and tie and became a capitalist... There was nothing I could do to upset my family more than that.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.

'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

The music scene in the '70s was like the United Kingdom in the '70s - we had a lot of unemployment, we had inflation, we had a lot of strikes going on, on a national scale, and a lot of discontent. That was reflected in the music.

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

People might say I'm difficult, but did you ever hear anyone describe a label as 'difficult'? By nature, artists should challenge. When they call you difficult, it is a reflection of the imbalance of power.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Rock's always been the devil's music.

Me growing up in the '60s and '70s, there was almost something romantic about drugs, Keith Richards taking drugs and stuff.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far.