Quotes from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“I suspect almost every day that I’m living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don’t like myself. What’s more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we’ve got and, simplistic as it may seem, it’s a person’s duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We’re all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“... the twin concepts of nihilism and the antihero have had it. What began with The Wild One and James "nobody understands me" Dean, ran with increasing vehement negativism up through the Stones and Velvets and Iggy ... [I]t may be time, in spite of all indications to the contrary from the exterior society, to begin thinking in terms of heroes again, of love instead of hate, of energy instead of violence, of strength instead of cruelty, of action instead of reaction.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“All humans are the same sex, except albinos.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“A fellow writer told me that Richard [Hell] once told her that the best thing about being a rock 'n roll star would be the option of constructing his environment so that he would never have to be around anyone he didn't want to know from, which not only sounds like building your own concentration camp but is just exactly what most of the declining rockstars of the Sixties have done to themselves.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get ‘em up dancin.’ It’s not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of “community,” i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad—that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Art", "Bop" and "rock and roll" and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it's nothing but a wham-o toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it's nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don't worry about the fact that it's a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that's gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it is the strogest, most virulent, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could ever destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, a mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.”
― Lester Bangs, quote from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

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Popular quotes

“It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from The Rum Diary

“We’re here to execute a murderer,” Zil said, pointing at Hunter. “We are bringing justice in the name of all normals.”
“There’s no justice without a trial,” Astrid said.
Zil grinned. He spread his hands. “We had a trial, Astrid. And this chud scum was found guilty of murdering a normal.
“The penalty,” he added, “is death.”
Astrid turned to face the mob. “If you do this, you’ll never forgive yourselves.”
“We’re hungry,” a voice cried, and was immediately echoed by others.
“You’re going to murder a boy in a church?” Astrid demanded, pointing toward the church. “A church? In God’s house?”
Zil could see that those words had an effect. There were some nervous looks.
“You will never wash the stain of this off your hands,” Astrid cried. “If you do this, you will never be able to forget it. What do you think your parents would say?”
“There are no parents in the FAYZ. No God, either,” Zil said. “There’s just humans trying to stay alive, and freaks taking everything for themselves.”
― Michael Grant, quote from Hunger

“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor surpressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And whi was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos. I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many were there. But I wouldn't set out to look for proof, either. Following the practice of the bluecaps, I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible. How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the workibg class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn't it expedient?

That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“He glares at me. "I've had to watch you die once, isn't that enough?"
"All you have to do is make sure it doesn't happen again." I give him a sunny smile. "Simple."
"The only thing simple is you. Stubborn little..." His grumbles fades to a point where I can't hear them, but I suspect they're not compliments.”
― Susan Ee, quote from World After

“How can you stay so calm?"
It helps if you're terrified.”
― John Flanagan, quote from The Battle for Skandia

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