Black Flag Quotes
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I don't talk down to kids. Usually someone my age who's talking to a ten or twelve year old is yelling at them.
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I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction.
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I just want to be able to stand up straight for a little while before I get cut down.
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We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.
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We didn't call it a sport necessarily, and skaters definitely weren't thought of as athletes, we were thought of as misfits.
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If you watch a stretch of TV for a few hours, there is a good chance you'll hear me on some commercial or in some documentary or on a cartoon as some voice of a character.
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I still think the best metal bands have a blues feel. The first Black Sabbath album is kind of a bludgeoning of blues. Deep Purple also started out as a blues band.
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I would like to get out to the region in the Caspian sea. I would like to go there. I would like to get to Darfur. I would like to get to Khartoum in Northern Sudan. I would like to get to Zimbabwe. I would like to go back to North Korea, if I could. I would like to go to Yemen. I would like to get to Kashmir. Most of those destinations I will get to.
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I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it.
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When you start to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive.
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There are things that happen so quickly. A better cameraman can capture them, but if the light is not bright and you hoist up your camera by the time you've dialed in your settings. There are eye blink moments where you're like "Aaahhhh, I wish," but those are too many to catalogue. Nothing really sticks out.
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Art comes after the fact, as a witness to certain things that have happened.
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If I was gay, there would be no closet, you would never see the closet I came out of. Why? I would have burned it for kindling by the time I was 12. Because I know with all certainty in my mind, there is nothing wrong with being gay, and you know it.
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When the Iron doesn't want to come off the mat, it's the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn't teach you anything.
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Young, gay and stuck in Arkansas? Sounds like a horror flick.
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I don't try to be angry to prove something. I wouldn't try to intimidate you for any reason unless you were trying to intimidate me, and then I would show you that you can't do that to me.
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As miserable as life may be I hold it pretty precious
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There are several books out on punk history, but I haven't read any of them. I was there.
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I have healthy disagreements with political parties I'm not aligned with, but I don't think it should be to the point where we're cursing and trying to strangle each other.
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Sitting in a room, alone, listening to a CD is to be lonely. Sitting in a room alone with an LP crackling away, or sitting next to the turntable listening to a song at a time via 7-inch single is enjoying the sublime state of solitude.
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More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, 'Survive' and 'Babylonian Gorgon,' were great and made many of my mix tapes.
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Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.
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Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.
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I was in Pakistan in Islamabad when Bhutto was assassinated, and the next day, you know, there's just plumes of smoke everywhere. I mean, Islamabad is on fire.