Quotes About Influence

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

It's possible this whole Why do Latinos love Morrisey? question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.

We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love without any acumen of normalcy. There is no normal, because everyone is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller.

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like Say Anything are fucking people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life.

The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.

The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.

Tall people are naturally confident. History has proven this - Alexander the Great, Wilt Chamberlain, Gisele.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I

this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin.

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal," because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don't care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert needed ABBA to invent gay Australians. The

Literary posterity may

The matter forever, you have to matter to those who don't care.

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don't really care what your qualifications are.

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.