Black Flag Quotes
-
When you're little and you don't have much dough, you have to innovate. You have to be sharp.
-
I get letters from young people telling me that they're broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, 'I would rather be heard than paid.'
-
I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like.
-
For me, speaking to anyone - on a stage, in an elevator - I am looking for impact and connection. The same goes for writing.
-
I didn't want to work at Pizza Hut and I didn't want to join the Army. So I just decided to go out and be awesome.
-
We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost.
-
The best compliment I get every year is that a band will write me and say, 'We were just on tour, and we had people coming to our show saying they had never heard us before they heard us on your show.'
-
I was very influenced by comics. The drawing style, definitely, I was interested in. My style of drawing is largely a comic style, but it's also much more obvious than comics.
-
No one can help me with my work. I think I do best when I am just left alone.
-
I get a lot of shit because I put "I" in the lyrics all the time. The "I" is always for someone else... When I say "I," it's so that when that person is singing along with the song, it empowers them.
-
Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.
-
It's inevitable that everyone's first drawing they draw is much like their fingerprint. It's inescapable that one has an identifiable style. It's not a major issue with me, but I never wanted to have a distinctive signature style so much.
-
I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power.
-
When was the last time you wanted to say it all to the right person To have it all come out right, to surprise yourself at how together you could be. When was the last time you ever met someone who made you want to give it all to them I mean give yourself to them. Where you couldn't express yourself enough - like you wanted to cut off one of your arms to be understood. That's it - you would cut your head off to have someone understand you. You know how pointless that one is. You know how many times you've smashed yourself to bits on the rocks.
-
If the death of Osama Bin Laden brings any peace to those who lost loved ones on that awful day in September 2001, that is a great thing. It is more likely, however, just a painful reminder of what was lost.
-
I've enjoyed, to a certain extent, any country I've been in, of course like Serbia and Croatia can be very restrictive and oppressive, and frustrating, but they're still very beautiful.
-
People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the bands existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. Im sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared.
-
If there was a god, he wouldn't let a guy walk right up and shoot you in the face now would he? That's right, now you get the picture. Truth burns doesn't it?
-
I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.
-
To me, the real 'state of the union' is found in how Americans react to current events.
-
I never thought I was right for TV or that TV was right for me.
-
That's where the economy is going. It went somewhere. Just not to America. And the money made? That went to the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Not back here. Never to be taxed.
-
Quite often people will get an animal which is probably not a good idea for them to have. They get it out of enthusiasm, there is a genuine interest, but sometimes they're not exactly prepared for what they're getting themselves into.
-
Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.