80s Quotes

I was an 80's/90's baby so you went to the movie theater every weekend and there was one on, whether it was Stallone, Van Damme, Seagal or Schwarzenegger himself. ~ Channing Tatum

Sexcastle is a perfect mix of homage and comedy, action and irony, loving tribute and hilarious send-up of the great, good, and ungodly-bad action movies of the '80s. I don't remember the last time a debut book hit me this hard. Literally, this book punched me in the face. It's THAT mean. ~ Matt Fraction

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist.

In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter.

Martijn Benders

Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca. ~ Raquel Cepeda

So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s! ~ CeeLo Green

I've been vegetarian since the 80s and, lately, even vegan. And I once happened to witness the slaughter of a cow. What atrocity must undergo an animal to satisfy the appetite of those fat
men who eat hamburgers! ~ Anthony Kiedis

Francis Coppola was very generous. We got paid a lot of money and he saw us every day, took us out every night. It was just a lot. Richard Gere was an absolute gentleman. Gregory Hines. You know, I worked with some giants and they were just so smooth. And it was the '80s. That's when people had a lot of money and it was okay to to hang out and be crazy. ~ Jackee Harry

You couldn't define the '80s when the '80s were happening. We kept changing. We had shoulder pads, then we didn't. It was revealing, and then it was decoration. It was a lot of things at once. It was defined when it was over. ~ Donatella Versace

Probably Lloyd in 'Say Anything' is the closest to me - or to who I was at the time. It was just a great love story about people in the '80s, and we all tried to make it feel as real as possible. It was such a wonderful time. We didn't leave anything in the gym; we put it all out there. ~ John Cusack

I once died my hair blonde, and it looked like an orangey-red carrot top. It was the '80s, and I was trying to look like George Michael. At the time, the ladies loved it, and I loved it too! ~ Nigel Barker

There was a great magazine in the '80s called 'Cinemagic' for home moviemakers who liked to do monster and special effects movies. It was like a magazine written just for me. ~ Peter Jackson

When I was in the California legislature in the '80s, the organic growers, who were sort of the small hippie farmers in those days, brought it to my attention that there were no regulations on organic labeling. In essence, anybody could just grow a thing any way they wanted and put 'organic' on it. ~ Sam Farr

I mean, my age is just a number. So what if you were born in the era when they still used rotary phones and cassette tapes? I think it's cute. ~ T.S. Krupa

When I first decided to open a restaurant, I was turned down by several banks. It was the late 80's and many restaurants were failing. I refused to give up because I knew I had a good concept. ~ Emeril Lagasse

I have been interested in global web-based communities and emerging technologies since the mid 80's. There is a revolution occurring in global culture nowadays, that will change everything. and it's only just beginning. ~ Alex Winter

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later.
Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this. ~ Jean Thompson

Vegas; one of the few places still encouraging men in their fifties to dress like their in a boy-band from the 80's. ~ Dov Davidoff

The first years of my life were spent in a roller disco in the early '80s called Flipper's. It was a real riotous, incredible time. I am slightly obsessed with the place. ~ Liberty Ross

The '80s was brand new. It was AIDS. It was gangbanging. It was starting to become big dope-dealing, and crack was starting to flood the neighborhoods. And then you had hip hop, which was something new, other than what we were doing, which was sports, playing football, basketball, baseball. And I was excited. ~ Ice Cube

I'm in my 80s and not a keen television fan. ~ Nigel Kneale

Well, when I started modeling in the mid-'80s, the girls who did shows did shows, and the girls who did magazines did magazines. That's what was understood. ~ Naomi Campbell

In the 80's we had high, high, waisted pants, that if they came up any higher they'd have to go up another size, if you know what I mean. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

I'm just not going to tour. One point I want to get across to everybody is that I'm still going to make records and I may still do some events. It's not the last time I'm onstage. It's been a part of my life for too long to quit everything. I have done it since the '80s, and I think it's time now to maybe see if I can live without that part. ~ George Strait

I wanted a Blaine but ended up with a Duckie. ~ Ashley Edward Miller

The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena. ~ Steve Erickson

I like it better that people aren't throwing stuff at my face and trying to fight me on stage. Like in the '80s, it was just aggravating all the time. I have scars from cigars and cigarettes on me, Bic pens, burns from cigarette lighters, all that. ~ Henry Rollins

I think I had a lot of bad hair moments. In the early 80's just sometimes I wore purple lipstick or green lipstick. ~ Madonna Ciccone

There was a big horror boom in the '80s, and I liked its originality and what you could get away with. ~ Chris Wooding

I produced six movies with Amy Robinson since the very early '80s. ~ Griffin Dunne

Gluten free pizza elicits the same response at a hollywood party that a pile of cocaine did in the 80's. ~ Natasha Leggero

When I die, sprinkle my ashes over the 80's. ~ David Lee Roth

I think that age as a number is not nearly as important as health. You can be in poor health and be pretty miserable at 40 or 50. If you're in good health, you can enjoy things into your 80s. ~ Bob Barker

'Blade Runner' was one of several dystopian science-fiction films to tank in the early and middle '80s. 'Tron,' 'The Dark Crystal,' 'The Keep,' 'Labyrinth': none found a large audience. ~ Richard Corliss

This is me trying to bridge the gap and make a record that I'm truly proud of, I've got my 80s side and my indie side, my super pop slant and the electronic music that I love. I wanted to make happy, feel-good music. It all comes from an organic place ~ Blake Lewis

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it took effort to be a nerd. You had to seek out the nerd stuff. ~ Chris Hardwick

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me. ~ Cat Power

In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good! ~ Al Yankovic

It's a funny thing with the inspiration thing. There's always loads of music around that I absolutely love and films going back to when I started making film music in the mid-80's. ~ Steven Price

AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the '80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex. ~ Michael Stipe

I grew up in New Jersey in the '80s. That means one thing: Big hair ... I had big hair, my boyfriends had big hair, we all had big hair. Our prom looked like the poodle division of the Westminster dog show. ~ Jancee Dunn

We don't realize how much the NFL is quietly drifting towards flag football. During the '80s, part of the defense's goal was to put the fear of God into offensive players ... that's fading away. ~ Bill Simmons

When I was a kid I was really into horror films. I watched every single horror film that came out in the 80s. ~ David Hayter

I was fortunate enough to hook up with Quincy Jones and had a lot of success. But the music of the '80s really changed when the '90s hit. For me to chase that dream or career of music, I started a family, started on 'Melrose Place,' so it was something I didn't have the time or energy. ~ Jack Wagner

I was not even allowed to mention the name Madonna in my household - just because I think the '80s and '90s were so Madonna-filled. She was going through so many evolutions at that time. ~ Katy Perry

I've always been a huge Butthole Surfers fan. The first time I saw them was in the early '80s when all they had out was their first EP. I thought they were amazing. They've always been a huge influence and one of my all-time favorite bands. ~ Buzz Osborne

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember. ~ Alex Chilton

No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work. ~ Bruce Springsteen

I'm lucky to have very good genes. My mother was so tiny she was almost bird-like, and my father was tall and lean. Both lived until their early 80s. ~ Cherie Lunghi

When we go into the 80's it has more of a pop feel. But it's what I wanted to do. I wasn't trying to reach. See, that's the thing with me, I never wanted to reach any particular crowd. I'm writing for myself. If I don't like it I won't play it for anybody. ~ Shuggie Otis

My biggest successes were mainly in the pop market during the 80s. ~ Juice Newton

On the other hand, even a big, '80s love van was less noticeable than six flying kids and their talking dog.
So there you go. ~ James Patterson

Certainly there are dozens of over-50 actresses who look great: Sophia Loren, Susan Sarandon, Ursula Andress, Stefanie Powers, Raquel Welch, Barbara Eden, Joanna Lumley, Linda Gray - the list is endless, and these are just the actresses! I have many friends in their 60s, 70s and 80s, not in the limelight, but who all look absolutely stunning. ~ Joan Collins

Wig Out At Jagbags is inspired by Cologne, Germany, Mark Von Schlegell, Rosemarie Trockel, Von Spar and Jan Lankisch, Can and Gas; Stephen-Malkmus-imagined Weezer/Chili Peppers, Sic Alps, UVA in the late 80's, NYRB, Aroma Charlottenburg, inactivity, Jamming, Indie guys trying to sound Memphis, Flipper, Pete Townshend, Pavement, The Joggers, The NBA and home life in the 2010's ... ~ Stephen Malkmus

My maternal grandmother was the longest-lived of my grandparents. She migrated to Australia in her 80s and lived into her 90s. It was great that she got to be part of my adult life. ~ Nick Earls

I dance around my living room to cheesy '80s aerobics music until I'm sweating really hard! ~ Evangeline Lilly

I've spent more time playing golf than anything else the last 18 years. Just wanted to be an 80s-shooter. Got there, too. ~ Jack Nicholson

When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience. ~ Joel Edgerton

My great grandma, she's in her 80s, so she tells me a lot about the things she's seen. I learn a lot from her. ~ Akeem Ayers

I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me. ~ Ernest Cline

In the '80s, everything became too serious. ~ Elsa Peretti

'Lost Boys' is one of my all-time faves. I just thought it would be great to be a vampire. I remember this movie called 'Once Bitten,' which is about an '80s sort of power girl who became a vampire and was really, like, sexy. Hair like she was from 'Dallas,' shoulder pads, big earrings. ~ Lena Headey

The trumpet player, Ronnie Hughes, has still got his chops today but for some strange reason the culture doesn't call him because he's 83-years-old. And these people are in their 70s and 80s and 90s and came with such verve every day and would still be shooting these 10 and 12 hour days. So, that in itself made this an extraordinarily special occasion for all of us. It wasn't a job for the crew after a few days, it took on another tone. ~ Dustin Hoffman

People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of 'Wired' magazine. Then things began to change. In the early '80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy. ~ Sherry Turkle

I'm a big action junkie. I grew up on the '80s action movies - the bad ones and the good ones. ~ Jonathan Tropper

It was a great time to grow up in Chicago. It was the mid-'80s, and we had the '85 Bears and the Michael Jordan era. ~ Bailey Chase

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and '80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

We all grew up in that era. I'm a little younger than these guys [Will Forte and John Solomon], but I would say all of us are huge fans of the original "MacGyver" series, and obviously we found that inspiration for the original pitch for MacGruber. We took his name and made it stupid. In terms of the inspiration for the movie, that really came from our love for late '80s/early '90s action movies - the whole "Lethal Weapon" series and "Rambo" and "Die Hard," every single [Arnold] Schwarzenegger and [Sylvester] Stallone film. ~ Will Forte

Folks in their 60s and 80s are reinventing how older people live. ~ David Oliver Relin

The Network Generation are secure in, and proud of, their Scottishness. Unlike my generation that grew up in the '80s, they don't see our sense of identity as under threat. ~ Douglas Alexander

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on.

They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats.

And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?"

In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always ~ Gabor Mate

What I do know, is that I refused to compromise with the system and I was obsessed with preventing my work from being manipulated for their propaganda. Even stories about the Holocaust could have been promoted as anti-fascist stories, which they were in a way, but I didn't want them to be taken only as such. I remember I had a reading in Berlin in the '80s and a man in the audience, asked me: 'Sir, I read your book, I read the stories, you didn't say who the oppressors were nor who are the people who are suffering.' And I said, 'No, I didn't.' It was important to me that a Vietnamese reader reading a story about a young boy who is in a camp, can recognize himself, without me saying: the boy is a Jew, the oppressor is a Romanian, or a Nazi, and so on. I wanted to have a more universal approach. ~ Norman Manea

We played more rock music when we were writing the script. 'Renegade'. All of the Styx songs. All of the old '70's and '80's music, that's the stuff that's pounding in the background while we were doing this stuff. It's a part of those movies. ~ Todd Farmer

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music. ~ Jessica Pare

My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the '80s, I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman. ~ Lou Doillon

We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time. ~ Angeles Mastretta

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. ~ Harry Leslie Smith

When I wrote 'Hatchet,' I knew that I was not re-inventing the wheel. That was never my intention. My goal was to make an '80s-style slasher flick that actually holds up. Basically, I wanted to make the movie that I wanted to see and pay no mind to current trends or conventions. ~ Adam Green

My hair is naturally curly, and in the 80's, even though I experimented with different lengths, I generally wore it curly. Since then, I've learned how to use a blow dryer and flat iron. ~ Susanna Hoffs

I mean, the thing about Guns N' Roses was that it wasn't trying to attach itself to the '80s, or anything that had to do with the '80s. It's just who we were at that time. We were doing what we wanted to do. That had really nothing to do with anything around us, except for the simple fact that we were rebelling against that stuff. ~ Slash

I'm used to the egos in the 1960s, '70s and '80s where people just expected massive success and thought it was their birth right to be successful. ~ Daryl Hall

The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s. ~ Warren Spector

If for no other reason than it's just fun to watch people age, and it's fun to watch what happened to '80s hairdos and outfits, and what they look like now. ~ Alex Borstein

When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the '80s - that I had Robert Wagner's pompadour. I said, 'What are you talking about? You mean the guy from 'Hart to Hart?' ~ Michael Weatherly

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. ~ Adrian McKinty

In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks. ~ Steve Albini

Most people found out about Slint in the mid or late 90s, but we were an '80s band. We started in 1986 and broke up at the end of 1990. ~ David Pajo

There's something about Michael J. Fox that I loved when he did all the '80s stuff. His way of performing all the physicality, which is why it's so tragic now, but the way he used his body so much as well, I loved. ~ James McAvoy

The way the credit cards were made in the '80s to be a people's form of capitalism and be able to make it so that you could get a loan that you would have been denied previous, now that's the way stocks are. ~ Jim Cramer

The way my mom dressed was one of my earliest inspirations, in those '80s suits with shoulder pads and things like that. For years, I ran away from that style. But now, all I want to do is shoulder pads and nipped-in waists and padded hips and peplums and poufed dresses. ~ Jason Wu

I suppose I was much more serious-minded in the '70s and '80s. ~ Paul Weller

I'm at least getting my foot in the door as far as doing straight dramatic parts, which no one would have ever considered me for in the '80s. I never objected to that because I love doing comedy, and I'm not the kind of actor that insists that unless you're doing a serious dramatic role, you're not acting. ~ Curtis Armstrong

I'm single, so I'm trying to do an overall overhaul. The look I'm going for is very '80s supermodel. It's time to be sexy. ~ Chloe Sevigny

The big gay clubs like Heaven started having mixed nights in the late '80s. ~ Neil Tennant

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

From the '70s and '80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: "The Battle of Evermore," "Spirit of Eden," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Close to the Edge," "In Your Eyes," "Thick as a Brick," "Cinema Show," "Echoes," and "The Killing Moon. ~ Bradley J. Birzer

There were incredibly few rock songs making it out to the airwaves until the '80s came along. ~ Joe Elliott

When I was coming up in the '80s television, if you were on television that meant either you were a young actor just coming up like I was, or you were an older actor whose career was over and you had to go on television. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

We didn't understand irony yet in the '80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy. ~ Chris Hardwick