Neil Strauss · 431 pages
Rating: (25.5K votes)
“On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“Looking down on it from the helicopter, with a bottle of Jack in my left hand, a bag of pills in my right hand, and a blond head bobbing up and doen in my lap, I felt like the king of the world.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“There was one dude in a jeans jacket who I swear to God shit in his pants when all of a sudden I was inches away from his face playing drums in the air.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“I've already spent ten years of my life apologizing for that band. As their manager, that's all I really did. Apologize. For years afterward I'd walk into a hotel lobby and the receptionist would call to me, 'Mr. McGhee.' And I'd run up and drop to my knees and say, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm really sorry.'
They'd look at me funny and say, 'No, nothing's wrong. You have a telephone call.'
And I'd breathe a sigh of relief and thank the good Lord above that I wasn't managing Mötley Crüe anymore.
~ Doc McGhee.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“There were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassionate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“The angry man will defeat Himself in battle As well as in life.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“We thought we had elevated animal behavior to an art form. But then we met Ozzy.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“I announced to everyone that I was embarking on a solo tour. Not a music tour, but a tour of drugs and prostitutes.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“I just wanted peace and quiet. So I waded into the ocean with a bellar in my hand. The waves were cold and kept smacking my clothes, higher and higher, until they knocked my drink out of my hand. Soon, my hair was wet and sticking to the back of my neck. Then I blacked out.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“If there’s one genetic trait that automatically disqualifies a man from being able to rock, it’s curly hair. Nobody cool has curly hair; people like Richard Simmons, the guy from Greatest American Hero, and the singer from REO Speedwagon have curls. The only exceptions are Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople, whose hair is more tangled than curly, and Slash, but his hair is fuzzy and that’s cool.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“Did you get your presents from me?" I asked.
"Nikki." Doc grimaced. "You're sick. I answered the door, and there were two girls in Nazi outfits and a nun. What's wrong with you?"
"Fuck, Doc. I was just having fun. How about you, Mr. Udo? Did you enjoy your gifts?"
"My wife is like my air," he said.
"Huh?"
"Without her, I cannot live, She is my air."
I stood there feeling like a giant prick. I had tried to contaminate his air.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“I understood then why rock stars have such big egos: from the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“Fate, however, has a way of finding your vulnerabilities where you least expect them, illuminating them so that you realize how glaringly obvious they are, and then mercilessly driving a spike straight into their most delicate center.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“Nowadays, I don’t believe in the Christian concept of a God who created people for the sole purpose of judging and punishing them. After all, if one of the commandments is “Thou shalt not kill,” does that make God a hypocrite when he does things like flooding the world or destroying Sodom and Gomorrah?”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“Those words—“Trust me, I’m a junkie”—should have been a clue right there.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“A funny thing about girls, though, is that the more you do wrong, the more they like you.”
― Neil Strauss, quote from The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
“A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life.”
― Leslie T. Chang, quote from Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
“now, I know the answer with absolute certainty: the most destructive force isn’t anything you can hold physically with your hands, it’s something you hold in your heart. It’s a tiny five-letter word, not even hard to pronounce: g-u-i-l-t. It kills you slowly from the inside out, and there are no drugs to numb the pain.”
― Jamie Ayres, quote from 18 Things
“Carmack wrote some code that duped the computer into thinking that, for example, the seventh tile from the left was in fact the first tile on the screen. This way the computer would begin drawing right where Carmack wanted it to. Instead of spitting out dozens of little blue pixels on the way over to the cloud, the computer could start with the cloud itself. To make sure the player felt the effect of smooth movement, Carmack added one other touch, instructing the computer to draw an extra strip of blue tile outside the right edge of the screen and store it in its memory for when the player moved in that direction. Because the tiles were in memory, they could be quickly thrown up on the screen without having to be redrawn. Carmack called the process “adaptive tile refresh.” In lay terms, as Tom immediately understood, this meant one thing: They could do Super Mario Brothers 3 on a PC! Nobody, no one, nowhere had made the PC do this. And now they could do it, right here, right now, take their all-time favorite video game and hack it together so it could work on the computer. It was almost a revolutionary act of subversion, he thought, especially considering Nintendo’s stronghold on its own platform. There was no way to, say, copy a Nintendo game onto a PC as one would tape an album. But now they could replicate it tile for tile, blip for blip. It was the ultimate hack. “Let’s do it!” Tom said. “Let’s make the first level of Super Mario tonight!” He”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
“If this were an indie movie, we'd start talking about the constellations," Solomon said, looking up at the stars.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Highly Illogical Behavior
“Killer: yes. Exploiter of secrets: no.”
― A.R. Torre, quote from The Girl in 6E
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