Richard Hell Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways. — Richard Hell

I've come to think of myself as a writer of books. — Richard Hell

The purpose of rock n' roll is to convince girls to pay money to get close to you. — Richard Hell

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

Things always change, and New York teaches you that. — Richard Hell

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

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

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

I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears. — Richard Hell

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

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

Basically, I have one feeling ... the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away ... See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to ... walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of 'here'. — Richard Hell

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

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

The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. You don't know how much you can trust your memory. You don't want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel. — Richard Hell

If you take text and image and you put them together, the multiple readings that are possible in either poetry or in something visual are reduced to one specific reading. By putting the two together, you limit the possibilities. Text and image don't always work together in the way music and song lyrics become part of each other. — Richard Hell

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

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

I'm usually alone or asleep, at home. — Richard Hell

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

I walk in the sprinkling rain like a lion. Pretty soon there won't be lions anymore. If I have to die to be a lion I'll die. I'm roaring, but in the language of rain and sand: I am invisible, I blend in, and I'm not hungry so everyone is safe. I can just observe them, join them, I can admire them, I can pity them and love them. They're so pathetically beautiful I could cry. How could I ever forget that this world is gorgeous and interesting? Every little detail is a gateway to huge canyons of knowledge and understanding. And it's all so sexy. Nothing is restrained, everything is perfectly, ripely, ravishingly itself, and swollen with signs and information that link it in the web. — Richard Hell

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

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

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

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

I believe in people treating each other with respect. — Richard Hell

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

Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on. — Richard Hell

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

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

I love a good play, but they're too hard to find. — Richard Hell

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace. — Richard Hell

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end. — Richard Hell

I think love is sort of a con you play on yourself. I think the whole conception of love is something the previous generation invents to justify having created you. You know I think the real reason children are born is because parents are so bored they have children to amuse themselves. They're so bored they don't have anything else to do so they have a child because that will keep them busy for a while. Then to justify to the kid the reason he exists they tell him there's such a thing as love and that's where you come from because me and your daddy or me and your mommy were in love and that's why you exist. When actually it was because they were bored out of their minds. — Richard Hell

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened. — Richard Hell

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

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