Retrospective Reflection Quotes

In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.

Right after we recorded 'Satanic Satanist' and 'American Ghetto' here in Boston, we decided we'd grow our hair out. This is - was - like the Beatles thing. I wanted to see these pictures later in life.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

There's a reason Archie didn't go the way of Betty Boop or Davy Crockett or Woody Woodpecker, forgotten relics of a bygone era, and it's because when 'Archie' stories are at their best, anyone of any age can see a little bit of themselves in them.

I had a similar year back in 1984 when I felt like I couldn't lose.

Happy Days was about a family... although the show was shot in the 70s, it was about a family in the 50s. I realized that kids were watching their parents grow up and the parents were watching themselves grow up. That was the key to the success of our show.

Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight.

I'd love to be a filmmaker and look back and be like, 'Ah, man, we were part of that whole '80s video nasty thing!'

I did more sessions than I remember doing. There were a lot of things in the Seventies that I played on that people keep reminding me about.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

I had a pretty hilariously gloomy few years in the '70s.

'Tragedy' and 'Loud City Song' are both inspired by stories from the past.

This journey started about 42 years ago in a little town of Brunswick, Georgia.

With 'Dazed and Confused,' I got the high school experience I didn't get to have.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

My best year was probably 1948, and after that, it's been downhill for me.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

In the '80s, it was difficult and frustrating to appear in the theater and TV again, even though I had some successful shows and hit records. Now, I have to say, the '90s are the best decade of my life. I've done the best work and, in a funny way, I'm enjoying the most success... more than in the '70s.

An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

I think that it's interesting how shows like 'Walking Dead' or even 'Game of Thrones,' with all its fantasy elements, have become so popular. Sometimes, though, I get a little bit annoyed because the whole nerd thing taking over and is now cool, and it wasn't cool when I was younger.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

When I started out, nearly every architect I knew was working in public practice; that's where the radical thinking was done. But, there's always a danger of looking back as our fathers did and saying, 'Things were better then.'