Richard Hell Quotes

You realize there are certain things that you'll never do that you always thought would be part of your future. It's a big relief to discover what you are best suited for, and it's a real advantage to be able then to focus.

The purpose of rock n' roll is to convince girls to pay money to get close to you.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

I usually don't think of anyone ever suspecting that I might be someone who'd cry at stuff. I cry at movies all the time. And sometimes it really pisses me off because I hate it when they're just jerking my chain and it's just like completely manipulative.

I walk in the sprinkling rain like a lion. Pretty soon there won't be lions anymore. If I have to die to be a lion I'll die. I'm roaring, but in the language of rain and sand: I am invisible, I blend in, and I'm not hungry so everyone is safe. I can just observe them, join them, I can admire them, I can pity them and love them. They're so pathetically beautiful I could cry. How could I ever forget that this world is gorgeous and interesting? Every little detail is a gateway to huge canyons of knowledge and understanding. And it's all so sexy. Nothing is restrained, everything is perfectly, ripely, ravishingly itself, and swollen with signs and information that link it in the web.

Basically, I have one feeling ... the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away ... See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to ... walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of 'here'.

The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. You don't know how much you can trust your memory. You don't want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.

When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

We still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

I decided I wanted out because it was killing me, and I couldnt see where to go with it that wouldnt be fatal.

Well, I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop. They came in and topped everybody, for sure. They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them.

It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.

I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways.

Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

I've come to think of myself as a writer of books.

Memories are better than life. Nothing I'm part of is good until later. I love what time does. I make decisions on the basis of sensing what will produce the best memory. They're my finest works: all that multidimensional and liquid maze of experience minus the fear and uncertainty, or with the fear and uncertainty changed to something else. Because they're already finished. I made them up and they comprise me. It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity jewels are pressed into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories. Usually it's better to get things over with so you have the memory. But like the best poems, they're also never really finished because they gain new meaning as time reveals them in different lights. Maybe every memory is inside you from the beginning; they erupt and branch and merge in fantastic patterns, but if you really tried you could trace any one of them back to the same original. Maybe the best ones are all the same: of being born. Or dying, or whatever it is.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.

I'm usually alone or asleep, at home.

Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on.

I believe in people treating each other with respect.