Were Quotes

When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.

I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.

I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

Our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn't have much to say about how they'd make it right. They want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

For everything I do, I think about a 6-year-old girl and her mom that I saw at my concert last night. I think about what those two individuals would think if I were at a club last night. I never want to be arrested, and I never want to get a DUI, those are my moral values.

Sometimes the directors were afraid of what they brought out of me.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band.

I grew up watching all these crazy movies, European movies and stuff, and I guess that I always laughed at things that were a little more offbeat.

I feel like we were the last generation, and there's this big divide before and after the 1990s. I feel sorry for the kids today. It's all too much.

We need to go back to the way it was 30 years ago, when everybody had Grandma and Grandpa, and we were willing to pass moral judgments about right and wrong.

I think about my goals. There were a lot of times in gymnastics when I really didn't want to go in and train, but you can't make it to the Olympics if you don't train!

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.

I've dated a couple of guys who were awesome, and the celebrity part of my life and the traveling part are hard to get around. You never get to see each other, especially if you're both musicians.

My ancestors were fighters, something I have inherited.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.