Quotes About Rebellion

I wanted the attention I missed at home, so I became the leader of a gang. That way, I got attention and was recognized as being important. It wasn't a bad gang - you know, in poor districts in New York, there's a gang to every block. We never robbed at the point of a gun; we'd steal potatoes from a grocery store, or crackers.

I got fired from my first job in a store when I was a student because I kept wearing my own things, and people kept asking me where they were from, and the owner of the store got annoyed with me. So I got fired because I couldn't afford to buy the clothes from the store.

I think that what's perceived as punk out in shopping malls or in chain stores or on MTV has almost nothing to do with what punk is about.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

I'd go to meetings with record companies - CBS, Decca, EMI. They'd tell me to wear a pair of jeans and grow my hair and look normal. And I'd say, 'Sod that,' and storm out. And I do think that belligerence is important when you're young.

I think that fashion, for a long time, has been in a prison. Without freedom. I think that without freedom, with rules, it's impossible to create a new story.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

I know women that act queeny, I know men that are straight that act queeny, and I know gay men that act queeny... To me, those are people who think the rules don't apply to them.

I rebelled by not getting straight A's and not following the path that my elder sister did. She was valedictorian and is very exemplary in her way. I look a lot like her, so I just had to do the opposite. Not that I got bad grades, but I was all about performance and just finding any way that I could to be involved in any kind of production.

When I was a kid, I wanted a Chanel bob and bangs. My mom said no. I went to the salon anyway, and they said, 'No way - we are not going to do that to your hair.' So I did it myself. Big mistake. Instead of my bangs going down straight, they were sticking up like a cat. It was horrible.

The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.

We live in world that wants to burnish the rough edges and straighten the crooked line, but conformity doesn't beget greatness.

I hate going to the gym and doing it the old-fashioned way. I hate anything that's too straightforward, too routine, too familiar. I get bored really, really quickly.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I've always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.

When that punk strain came to Britain and infected everyone. It was more than just a sound. There was an ethos, an ethic that went with it.

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.

I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

I am strangely attracted to the hooligan crowd. I find them actually less dangerous than some of the people I work with now in Hollywood.

His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.

The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.

But they put up such a fight, particularly in Cork, Clare, Tipperary, Longford, Limerick and Mayo, that they tied up well over 50,000 troops and drove the RIC out of all but the most strongly fortified barracks in the larger towns.

There was Brigade Major Montgomery, later Field Marshal Montgomery of El Alamein, who wrote of his Irish experiences: 'My whole attention was given to defeating the rebels. It never bothered me a bit how many houses were burned.