Retro Perspective Quotes

Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight.

My pop culture ended somewhere north of Elvis but not too far.

I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.

When I got to Hollywood, there wasn't even a Boulevard. I'm that old. It was just a little dirt trail. I'm kidding.

What was interesting was talking to older gay men about what it was like being gay in the Eighties.

I don't really remember much about the '60s at all. You know, 1970 is the first year I remember pretty well.

[In] my era everybody smoked and everybody drank and there was no drug use

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren't consumed by technology and television.

[Bill] Clinton's voice, his manner of speaking and his terminology, "Back in those days... Yeah, back those days... You know, we didn't have the internet back then." My grandfather said, "Back in those days, we didn't have automobiles".

When I was going to school in, like, '84 to '88, you didn't have cell phones. There was no e-mail, if you can wrap your brain around that.

We have a tendency in Quebec - and I include myself in this - to describe ourselves using the past. We're always nostalgic.

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand. I want to try to explain what the 1930s - the golden age of Hollywood - was truly like. People forget that America was such a different place then, not yet the dominant force in the world.

The '90s were indeed a great time to be alive. There was a sense of optimism that I never felt before that decade and I haven't felt since.

When I was your age, we didn't have the Internet in our pants. We didn't even have the Internet not in our pants. That's how bad it was.

Man, the '80s were pretty wacky. You had some stuff that was just so rad and some stuff that was just so wrong.

I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.

Let's face it, us '60s folks had pretty high expectations.

I came up during the 'Star Wars' generation and that was sort of the thing I plugged into much more. It was a little before my time and I think it was sort of grappling with these intellectual ideas that were a little advanced for my young mind. At the time. But now I have a much deeper appreciation for it.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

On today's athletes: I wish I could turn back the clock a little bit so I'd have a chance to cut it up with those guys.

I knew the term Stepford Wife, and I knew what that meant. I never read the book, and I think before I started filming I watched the movie. I thought it was very dated.

I think that's the fascinating thing about the '70s is that it turns out it was quite a dark decade. But, like, who knew?

Never did I dream that while I was feeling so self-conscious and inadequate in the '60s, I was actually creating The Judith Durham Look!

You know, the '80s, as crazy as the '80s were, that was a surprisingly kind and generous environment that I found myself in as a teenager.