The 80s Quotes

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

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

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 '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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is going to stay the same; nothing's gonna sound like in 1952. There's some stuff that has some elements of back in the day, like back in the 90's, back in the 80's or whatever. Some elements, but it's not going to be the same, exactly, sounding. And I love it, I've seen the music change. I've seen the flow and the energy go from turned up to turned down to back to turned up. I like to try different stuff. I don't like to do the same old thing over and over again. I don't like to be repetitive, that gets on my nerves. ~ Juicy J

I think the media needs a little criticizing now, as it did in the '80s, don't you? ~ Jose Padilha

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan. ~ Michael Moore

My roles in the '80s were, like, gender dysphoric. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't this, I wasn't that. And I am kind of butchy, you know. That's just my thing. ~ Pamela Adlon

I don't think we will use the 80s glossy sound again. ~ Ann Wilson

Everyone knows Aquaman, probably from all the animation he's been in over the years from the '70s and the '80s, entering him into the pop culture. ~ Geoff Johns

I think they could of recast the children, I heard of people wanting to do something like that. That would be a nice little show to do but you know that show was of the 80's, I don't think the audience mind set is in that direction any longer. ~ Larry Hagman

I'm a big fan of the '80s fantasy genre that I grew up watching, movies like "Krull" and "Clash of the Titans" and "Time Bandits" and all that stuff. ~ Zooey Deschanel

In the '80s, I thought I'd be a success as a woman if I were the president of a billion dollar company, had a sensitive soul-mate husband, two bilingual children, buns of steels, and a compost heap. In the '90s, I pretty much feel I'm a success if I can get through the afternoon without eating a cheesecake. ~ Cathy Guisewite

I guess personally I really like "Take on Me" by Aha. I think it just defines the 80s and how insane it was and like neon and like calculator watches and that whole thing. ~ Evan Peters

I'm a huge fan of the films of the '70s and even into the '80s, Sidney Lumet, all those films that used what was going on in people's lives as drama. And not only are you entertained, but hopefully have a greater understanding of your world coming out of it. ~ J. C. Chandor

I should have lived through the '80s, not been born in it. My style is a mix of hip-hop and '80s casual. ~ Michael Socha

The simplest way to do something cool is the cross-turn. Like in the '80s - Michael Jackson did it. You jump and cross your legs together at the same time, and then spin out of it. That's it. ~ Heather Morris

When people talk about gender-benders and bracket me with George, I always think I'm not like that. I had more of a rock edge, mixed with the 80s electro. ~ Marc Almond

The '80s were a much simpler time, mainly because the only superhero movie franchise anyone could complain about was Superman, and the Internet didn't exist so you couldn't even complain about it to too many people - just, like, your mom and maybe your imaginary friend or whatever ~ Brian Alan Ellis

The whole world has changed much since the '80's. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn't the case in the early '80's. ~ Sheena Easton

Australia is the same size as the U.S., but it's much smaller in terms of population. I've been working in the States off and on since the '80s, and the first time I played a lead here was in '91, I think. ~ Robert Taylor

I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural. ~ Moby

It was in the '80s, so I guess big hair and high bangs. And I had so many gummy bracelets! While we were doing 'Full House,' we were like, 'You know, in 10 years, we're going to look back on this and think this is horrible.' But everyone looked like that! ~ Candace Cameron Bure

The modern geek is more than just a refined version of the stereotypical movie geek from the '80s. ~ Jeff Potter

I see my life flashing before me when I see people in the audience singing along to something I wrote in the '80s, and they're maybe standing next to someone who knows the more recent stuff. ~ Dave Pirner

I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies. ~ Poppy Z. Brite

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies. ~ Jello Biafra

My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong. ~ Michael K. Williams

It's nice to have been around long enough to be a part of people's lives. A lot of people who come to my show are real nostalgic for the '80s. ~ Sheena Easton

Pledge Allegiance was a pretty generic name back in the day. In the 80's I was the promoter for all the punk rock shows and I'd book Black Flag, Dead Kennedy's, Minor Threat etc and I'd hook them up with places to stay if needed so it's hard to keep track of it all. ~ Reed Mullin

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work. ~ Jack Wagner

There was a lot of dancing in '76, '78, in the '80s. A lot of dancing. The burn years. A lot of dancing. And for a while, working fit in with all that. 'Moonlighting' - that wasn't acting. It was people telling me 'Let's create a character who is you, so you can play him the way you are. The guy you are at night.' It was fun. ~ Bruce Willis

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance. ~ Gavin Hood

I remember in the '80s, Randy Travis was my guy. He's the reason I moved to Nashville, and I just loved him. But at some point when he was winning everything, you find yourself pulling for other people. ~ Garth Brooks

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end. ~ Nick Harkaway

In the '80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn't really figured out how it worked yet ... You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions. ~ Adam Schlesinger

Now documentary evidence is acceptable. What does that mean? If you have documentary evidence that a person served as a guard in one of the death camps and the documents have been authenticated, that is grounds to charge the person with crimes against humanity. And that's why you see the spate of trials previously, for example, in the '70s and the '80s, even in the low '90s. That was not the case until the change in the law. ~ Marvin Hier

I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement. ~ Angela Davis

I love horror comedies, and I love horror movies. In particular, I love horror movies from the '80s that have practical monsters in them. They're not just slasher movies with people going to kill people in people's houses. Although I do like 'The Last House on the Left,' and things like that, I do like these ridiculous monster movies. ~ Ken Marino

Truthfully, I'm pretty stuck in the '80s. ~ Dan Harmon

If you think the '80s were dumber than the '70s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention. ~ James Lileks

Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics. ~ Daphne Guinness

I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the '80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain. ~ Martin Parr

And when I was a kid being an actor was not cool. I'm thirty now and when I was a kid in the 80s that wasn't a cool thing to be. ~ Vincent Kartheiser

The mood of the 80s - Get what you can, can what you get, and sit on the can. ~ Patricia Schroeder

What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary. ~ Robert Coover

I love Steven Wright. I was in high school in the '80s, and there was a lot of stand up on television. ~ Demetri Martin

I grew up in the '80s. I was a kid, but all my favorite movies came out of that period. ~ Dan Fogler

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought. ~ Janis Ian

My crystal ball or intuition tells me that in the '80s the impact of RIA [radioimmunoassay] on the study of infectious diseases may prove as revolutionary as its impact on endocrinology in the 60s. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

I like the movie 'Das Boot,' the German film made in the '80s. I found out it was a series that was made into a film for the U.S. ~ Courtney Gains

My fashion was not the best in the '80s. I looked crazy as hell. I used to wear my pants tucked into my socks and karate handkerchiefs around my wrist. It was ridiculous, how I used to dress in the '80s. ~ Deon Cole

At tea time, all the noise, greed and aggressiveness of the '80s can be drowned out. For 45 minutes, anyway. ~ Letitia Baldrige

Back in the '80s, a lot of the images I used were from TV or from films on TV. ~ Raymond Pettibon

I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time. ~ John Cusack

We lost our minds in the '80s and '90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what's going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn't work. ~ Adam McKay

One of my favorite eras is the '80s. I'm an '80s baby to the world, love everything about the '80s. ~ Deon Cole