Black Flag Quotes
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My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.
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The scars will take me far, they always do.
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I got three letters today telling me that I'm god. Why can't I pay the rent?
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I don't make art with grandiose delusions. I do know there are limits to what art is capable of. That makes it all the more appealing to me. And I can do as I will whenever I choose.
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When you're going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community.
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I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to tour with the Beastie Boys and watched almost every set they played on all those dates. Why not? You do your set and then you get to see the Beasties play? Best deal in town.
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Always knowing you're going to die And until then knowing you've got to live.
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All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time.
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After having read a lot of fiction, literature, whatever you want to call it, from Wolfe to Houellebecq, I think you have to have an understanding and insight of the human condition that is informed and motivated by a desire to immerse yourself in the human world and bring these stories to bear.
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We are occupants. No one has any lasting purchase on life or on the planet.
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I know that collector types can be a pain in the neck and seem perpetually frozen in time - or at least in their parents' basement - but someone has to look out for the past, lest it slip away forever.
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I enjoy helping. I like doing benefits and things like that, but don't feel the need to be thanked or even meet the people I am doing the benefit for.
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Airports in major cities, like LAX, are trippy environments. It is at once a national and international gathering of those in transition: The euphoric, emerging from planes, their journey at an end, and the determined, about to depart.
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It's one thing to buy a copy of 'Atlas Shrugged.' You actually have to read it to get anything out of it.
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I don't get a lot of choices in movies. It's not like I'm Brad Pitt and I can walk in and go here's the film I want to do and everyone runs around... I don't have that. I stand in line and do auditions. I'm there with 80 other guys trying to be that guy. Every once in awhile I luck out.
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Each year, every city in the world that can should have a multiday festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction.
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Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.
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Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead.
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I'm not trying to amass people in the streets. I just want them to be more aware.
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A man with an excruciatingly painful condition wrote me and told me that his doctor said that the only cure for what he has is death, and he might want to consider suicide. What do you say to him? I doubt the, "Hey let's go get some coffee and talk" thing is going to be at all helpful.
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I am primarily a loner. I don't go to clubs. I don't hang out with people. I don't know many people. It's just the way it ended up. It's not a sob story; it's fine for me.
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Whenever I write lyrics, in the back of my mind I always see a guy driving to work, driving to a really bad job, one of those horrible institutions, or one of those low squat buildings in Los Angeles. I write with that person in my mind.
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If it were a choice between me getting killed or one of my friend's kids, I would happily take the shot.
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I wonder what it's like to be from a state that is spread across a few islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, only added to the United States in 1959. Not only that but to be the birthplace of America's first black president? Pretty cool, I bet.