Henry Rollins Quotes
I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.
Quotes to Explore
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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There are a lot of guys who play in pro-style offenses who are not prepared when they come out of college. Either you're coaching the quarterback to be a quarterback, or you're not.
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You need people around you that care about you and are thinking about you in your best interest. And keep your mind straight.
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You don't have to aim to be the best of everything, thinking that one day you're going to be the top of the world; I don't think it exists.
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We've gone too far in thinking we can re-create an American democratic paradise in the Middle East.
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I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
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I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.
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I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
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Whether it's writing songs, being on stage, being interviewed, meeting fans - I just try to be myself, which is kind of exhausting because it almost feels like it never shuts off.
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I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
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The writers who inspire me most are all women: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. As for contemporary novels, one of my favourites is 'Everyone Brave is Forgiven' by Chris Cleave. It's the sort of book to read if you've fallen out of love with reading - it reminds you just how brilliant novels can be.
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You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
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When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing.
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I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.
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My rule of writing is that no one can do what you can do, so jealousy or competitiveness are pointless. I am always happy when one of my sisters has a book published that I get to read.
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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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Rock 'n' roll really is not given to thinking - and resents thinking. Which I believe is the big error of rock 'n' roll. It's always aspired to be the music of the working class. And it's never been looked upon as a vocabulary for art and artistic thinking... We have to be able to expand the vocabulary to express more complex thoughts.
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The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.
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Even as exuberant as my style is and as over the top as I may be, I can appreciate a classic when it's really well done.
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I do three things: speaking or teaching, which I enjoy the most, coaching is where I learn everything, and writing is where I reach people.
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There is kind of a typical experience as a premier. You go in, you win a couple, you get out. Go serve on boards, take your head out of the political ringer and take on a much more private life.
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If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
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We live in a very different world than the one that we inherited from our parents and from our grandparents. Times are changing, and states must adapt to win.
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I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.
