Richard Hell Quotes

#1. I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears.

Richard Hell

#2. Well, I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop. They came in and topped everybody, for sure. They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them.

Richard Hell

#3. We still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

Richard Hell

#4. In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

Richard Hell

#5. Only time can write a song that's really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals

Richard Hell

#6. It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

Richard Hell

#7. You realize there are certain things that you'll never do that you always thought would be part of your future. It's a big relief to discover what you are best suited for, and it's a real advantage to be able then to focus.

Richard Hell

#8. I usually don't think of anyone ever suspecting that I might be someone who'd cry at stuff. I cry at movies all the time. And sometimes it really pisses me off because I hate it when they're just jerking my chain and it's just like completely manipulative.

Richard Hell

#9. When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

Richard Hell

#10. I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.

Richard Hell

#11. I decided I wanted out because it was killing me, and I couldnt see where to go with it that wouldnt be fatal.

Richard Hell

#12. The purpose of rock n' roll is to convince girls to pay money to get close to you.

Richard Hell

#13. An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

Richard Hell

#14. A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

Richard Hell

#15. I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Richard Hell

#16. Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways.

Richard Hell

#17. I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

Richard Hell

#18. I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

Richard Hell

#19. It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.

Richard Hell

#20. I love a good play, but they're too hard to find.

Richard Hell

#21. I believe in people treating each other with respect.

Richard Hell

#22. It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.

Richard Hell

#23. There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same.

Richard Hell

#24. I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam war and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

Richard Hell

#25. There are characters in [punk] that do deliberately go as far as they can in certain kind of taboo areas.

Richard Hell

#26. Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Richard Hell

#27. Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

Richard Hell

#28. I've come to think of myself as a writer of books.

Richard Hell

#29. Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

Richard Hell

#30. A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

Richard Hell

#31. I'm usually alone or asleep, at home.

Richard Hell