Quotes About Nonconformity

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.

Fuck them, darling, if they just don't get it," retorted Freddie.

Technically, the song's a mess. It follows no known conventional nor commercial formula. It is just a string of dreams, flashbacks, flash-forwards, vignettes, completely disjointed ideas. It changes sequence, color, tone, tempo, all for

Are you a guy or a girl? I've heard the question all my life. The answer is not so simple, since there are no pronouns in the English language as complex as I am, and I do not want to simplify myself in order to neatly fit one or the other.

A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird.

For a punk Penny could be an unbelievable drag.

They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity.

Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crotchet-monger and an eccentric.

Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.

There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents, and only one for birthday presents, you know.

I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.

Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal-in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.

The world needs many more dreamers. Unreasonable souls who fight the urge to be ordinary.

Oliver Reed was a great man who did things his own way. He used to come into Harveys, my restaurant in Wandsworth, and sit on the floor to have a drink before going to the table.

If you're used to being a maverick, then people don't get surprised when you start acting strangely.

Society may shun bohemia, may put it down, may consider it useless and ineffective, but it is where everything cooks and boils and is created.

I will never do a usual film with song and dance; the character has to be important.

I don't know what I want, but I do know that I don't want the usual stuff, the cliched stuff is just too mind-numbing. They sell, I know, but it makes me sad to know that.

I do not wish to do usual things like Bollywood songs or so.

I've gone to great lengths not to be a guru. I think the notion of guruhood is utterly pathological, and I couldn't live that way. I am just a person.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.

The Pre-Raphaelites, while very bothered by what the establishment thought of them, also utterly rebelled against it. In everything - social, sexual, emotional - they were out on a limb, pushing the boundaries.