Michael Stipe Quotes
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The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I've always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, 'OK, that's me.'
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Be yourself. Follow your heart. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the best advice at anyone ever. Take advice from other people, but take from it what feels right for you.
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I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than [heavily influenced by Reagan and AIDS]. I'm really at peace with how afraid I am.
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I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics.
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I think there were early critics who wanted us to change the world because the Sex Pistols failed.
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I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.
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The world of WONDERLAND is authentic, vibrant, and genuine. Stacey D’Erasmo explores the delight and terror of second chances. A great read!
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I'm afraid of everything. I'm not a naturally courageous person.
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Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.
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I'm not homosexual, I'm not hetrosexual, I'm just sexual.
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If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!
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[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.
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I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown. It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, "I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this." I didn't want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop.
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Frankly I'm not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I'm not great with that level of substance abuse.
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There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
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If I'm tired of me, I'm sure the public is as well.
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By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.
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By nature I will find hope in everything. Even if it's the most incredibly hopeless situation or circumstance. That's just me... I'll never be able to see things any other way.
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At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.
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Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.