The Eighties Quotes

#1. What are you watching?"
One shoulder rose in a shrug. "Looks like an informercial for music of the eighties. Thinking about buying it.

J. Lynn

#2. Growing up in the eighties, you could go from one style in a movie to another style, and that was okay. In the nineties, you had to obey your niche. You had to follow the code and never step outside of exactly what you're doing.

Alexandre Aja

#3. AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.

David Bennun

#4. During the eighties and nineties, people wanted to be chic, elegant, bourgeois.

Donatella Versace

#5. During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, 'Hang on a minute - I can paint.' I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.

Ronnie Wood

#6. When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!

Dennis Hopper

#7. When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

Seth

#8. Has anything happened in Australia since the eighties? I mean, besides Nemo being reunited with his dad?

Wayne Gladstone

#9. What was interesting was talking to older gay men about what it was like being gay in the Eighties.

Dan Stevens

#10. When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.

James Balog

#11. Ignazio Michele Vitale," I say playfully, intentionally flubbing the middle name, just to get more of a rise out of him. "I can't believe you were singing a song from the eighties."
"You were seeing things.

J.M. Darhower

#12. The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.

Seanan McGuire

#13. I grew up in the eighties; that's probably why I like some of the earlier electronic from Kraftwerk to all throughout new wave and things like that.

Chino Moreno

#14. She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.

Joe Hill

#15. The eighties were my teen years, so the GoGos are sort of a touchstone.

Corin Tucker

#16. I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.

Derek Jarman

#17. In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch - everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.

Sirio Maccioni

#18. I'm constantly discovering things. Like Bobby Bland. Right now I suppose I'm into the Eighties, which turned out to be a great musical period.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#19. I don't spend much time listening to the records when they're done. Usually I let go of it. Especially in the Eighties and Nineties - they were like product, almost.

Joe Perry

#20. The eighties was an era when many companies were asset rich and cash poor.

Nicola Horlick

#21. The eighties are a sorely underrated decade in terms of musical composition. They don't get nearly the respect they deserve. I try to use my platform in the world to bring attention to this travesty by singing eighties ballads whenever I get the chance.

Emma Chase

#22. In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken of in the same breath.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#23. The Eighties proved we don't need liberals.

Rush Limbaugh

#24. If you watch any John Hughes film of the eighties, that was my childhood experience.

Aimee Mullins

#25. It's the eighties so where's our rocket packs?

Daniel Amos

#26. By the eighties, a lot of radio stations had started playing "Sixties" music. They called it "Classic Rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music.

Dave Barry

#27. I counterfeited Mark Kostabi's artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn't paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.

Andy Behrman

#28. For the past 10 years, people have been making fun of the eighties. Why are we bringing them back?

Lexa Doig

#29. We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#30. I stick to playing Brahms, but I love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I've also been a big fan of Earth Wind and Fire since the Seventies and of The Gap Band since the Eighties.

Condoleezza Rice

#31. Years ago, Myron had found this all somewhat poignant and oddly comforting - the war relic now housing artists - but the world was different now. In the eighties and nineties, it had all been cute and quaint. Now this "progress" felt like phony symbolism. Near

Harlan Coben

#32. We were the neoromantic dance freaks of the eighties, proudly displaying our blow-dried mullets. Among us, you also found the stud-bracelet-wearing punk rockers with sky-high Mohawks. Pastel-colored, shoulder-padded fashion met ripped-jeans-and-leather-jacket anti-fashion.

Gudjon Bergmann

#33. Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

David Bowie

#34. I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It's not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

Rowan Atkinson

#35. Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#36. I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn't know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

Tama Janowitz

#37. The weather here is gorgeous. It's mild and feels like it's in the eighties. The hot dog vendors got confused because of the weather and thought it was spring, so they accidentally changed the hot dog water in their carts.

David Letterman

#38. My problem is that I always find jeans that are either high-waisted or low-rise, but nothing in between, like they used to be in the eighties and early nineties. That's actually the most flattering cut.

Georgia May Jagger

#39. I was a guy back in the Eighties who was one movie away from a huge career, which at that time didn't happen. In the Nineties, I worked a lot, but it was kind of, 'Get out there and dig and find things.' Then I guess 'The Rookie' and 'Far From Heaven' were referred to as my comeback.

Dennis Quaid

#40. The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming.

Marc Maron

#41. If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

Will Self

#42. The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

Tom Clancy

#43. I think music is so diverse today, and bands are so diverse. If you were a rock band in the Eighties, you kind of had to stick to one thing. Now, in this age of Coachella and European festivals and stuff, it's kind of anything goes, so that allowed us to try different things.

Dexter Holland

#44. And some of what we're doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties.

Patricia Hewitt

#45. Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Robert Bly

#46. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

Kate Atkinson

#47. In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.

Peter York

#48. There's a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.

Michael Azerrad

#49. Back in the eighties, people thought a vegan was someone from Vegas. It's a different world now and I feel lucky to have been a part of the revolution, both for animal rights and gay rights.

Dan Mathews

#50. I think if you were to really peek under the hood of what got Aerosmith back again for our second life in the Eighties, you'll find out that it's exactly this, it's the willingness to take a risk.

Steven Tyler

#51. The eighties were a strange time for teenage fashion. We wore silk blouses and shoulder pads, neon earrings and jodhpur pants. Come to think of it, our pants were especially weird. We also wore stirrup pants, parachute pants, and velvet knickers. It was a real experimental pant time.

Amy Poehler

#52. I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.

Joe R. Lansdale

#53. New Wave art was the rage of the eighties. Now it's exhibited in oldies-but-goodies museums, usually in black-and-pink frames.

Brad Holland

#54. Towards the end of the seventies pop was gaining the momentum and respectability was very high with groups like Yes and Queen who were making "classical" rock records. They were also bringing in big bucks. So the eighties became the "bottom line" decade.

Tony Visconti

#55. The eighties turned the whole system upside down. They would sign three groups and give them five or ten million dollars each to make three records. Out of those three records maybe one would be a hit. The economy changed, and that's why the music changed.

Tony Visconti

#56. As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

Donald Hall

#57. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.

Jonathan Tropper

#58. My mom was one of the original designers for Coach in the eighties, and she designed some classics, including the City Bag. It's the only bag I use!

Jane Levy

#59. I love the folk-rock of the Seventies and the pop of the Eighties.

Gabrielle Aplin

#60. I aim to be pretty - I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.

Sara Blakely

#61. Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral.

Quentin Tarantino

#62. The story of the eighties will be the story of the Reagan administration and the many men and women who served in it, some of whom are already out on parole.

Dave Barry

#63. I spent most of the eighties, most of my life, riding around in somebody else's car, in possession of, or ingested of, something illegal, on my way from something illegal to something illegal with many illegal things happening all around me

Iggy Pop

#64. Shooting in Brooklyn is like opening a time capsule. Nothing has changed. Everything looks like it did in the eighties.

Freddie Prinze Jr.

#65. Bush began helping Enron in the eighties.

Paul Begala

#66. Being blonde now doesn't mean Marilyn Monroe vulnerability. Blonde in the Eighties means being in control.

Kim Wilde

#67. You should get him a mixed tape,' said Elyaas. 'Kids love mixed tapes. They're the cool 'in' thing right now.'
'was the last time you were summoned the eighties?' Magnus asked.
'It might have been,' Elyaas said defensively

Cassandra Clare

#68. Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

Mark Steyn

#69. That's the trouble with playing a cutting-edge narcotics detective - you've got to wear what's topical at the moment. My kids tease me about outfits I was wearing last week, let alone in the eighties.

Clark Johnson

#70. He broke up with me."
"Because you weren't in love with him. That's an iffy proposition, and I think he's handling with grace. A lot of teenage boys would sulk, or lurk around under your window with a boom box."
"No one has a boom box anymore. That was the eighties.

Cassandra Clare

#71. My father ran a famous L.A. nightclub complete with roller-rink - Flippers - in the early Eighties which was the West Coast's answer to Studio 54.

Liberty Ross

#72. My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.

Barry Manilow

#73. 'Revenge' is a shameless soap in the style of Eighties shoulder-pad slap-offs like 'Dallas,' 'Dynasty' and 'Falcon Crest.' Yet there's no wink-wink camp.

Rob Sheffield

#74. In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line.

Rick Perlstein

#75. With a groan, he let his head fall into his hands. His life was officially a bad eighties movie. Without the parachute pants.

Charlie Cochet

#76. I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

Paul Auster

#77. Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Edward Said

#78. In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.

Jill Lepore

#79. Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists.

Serge Lang

#80. I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

Walter Kirn

#81. His Charles Bronson-like demeanour together with his Clint Eastwood stare and his John Wayne swagger, created from a diet of westerns and Eighties TV mixed with a lifetime of planning, organising, managing, and leading, were now gelled together with the battle-hardened soldier he had become.

Connor Fitzgerald

#82. These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock ...

Junot Diaz

#83. A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Russell Banks

#84. In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

Mary Wesley

#85. Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven't been on a date since the late eighties.

Max Gladstone

#86. Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?" "Can we discuss the oldies another time?" "What? What? The oldies? I've already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart." "Hey!

Joe Hill

#87. There were many influences on me while growing up. In the late Seventies and early Eighties when I was growing up in Hyderabad, it was a bit more laid-back, and that gave you time to think about things differently without perhaps being caught up in the narrow approach to one's journey through life.

Satya Nadella

#88. The late eighties was a good vintage. ID was not yet fashionable so a lot of people were doing it for the right reasons - to make good design, not become stars.

Leander Kahney

#89. He watched me rake my fingers through the tangles in my hair and smiled.
"Quit it. You're fucking beautiful."
"Just point me to the nearest eighties rock video," I said.

Jamie McGuire

#90. If there is any justice in the world, then eighties rock will never again serve to blight humanity as it did in that dark decade!

Vivian Campbell

#91. there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),

Tana French

#92. When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.

Al Franken

#93. End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

David Graeber

#94. When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

John Trudell

#95. Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

Jill Lepore

#96. Just because you disagreed with the Poll Tax and detested Margaret Thatcher - "
"Detest is a little inappropriate," Parlabane said. "Maybe closer to say I spent the entire Eighties wishing I was pissing on her rotting corpse.

Christopher Brookmyre

#97. I don't think my Dad was ready for me to come back home, either. I think it had been a long time since he was forced to make conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, especially with the person who had been canceling out his vote in every single election since the mid-eighties.

Laurie Notaro

#98. In the Seventies and Eighties we all had our fun, and now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a certain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to be accepted as a freak.

Grace Jones

#99. During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

Florence King

#100. I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.

Patton Oswalt