Quotes About Nonconformity

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

Relish being an oddball: Well-behaved, well-adjusted people are hopeless storytellers and, honestly, terribly boring.

I was quite disruptive and out there. Then I found myself in a load of remedial classes being told how to use a ruler. But when they tested my IQ, they found out I was quite intelligent.

I think Led Zeppelin must have worn some of the most peculiar clothing that men had ever been seen to wear without cracking a smile.

So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely.

I'd been a long way from the campus but sometimes I felt the vibrations of my peer group. I understood some of the reasons for their revolt. Wasn't my voyage prompted by the same longings for freedom, the same desire to get out of the rut an routine, to prove something to myself - to prove perhaps that a kid doesn't have to be boxed in until he is a mental and spiritual dummy in a business suit?

I was marching to the beat of my own drummer, and I was clearly out of step with reality.

It was never meant to be a prescribed time and place for us to obsess about doing the appropriate thing at the appropriate moment all while wearing an appropriate outfit.

There's this expectation that we should all be sexual beings, but the fact is, not all of us are, particularly.

I've never walked the same path other people found comfortable and I'm not going to start now.

You should remember that you're a young lady. I'm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty!

I hate ordinary people!

having learned that people cannot be moulded like clay…

Lo que públicamente se entiende por normal no es lo más habitual, sino lo normativo, lo convencionalmente obligatorio. Pero dentro del secreto de nuestra intimidad, todos nos desviamos de la regla, todos somos de algún modo heterodoxos.

Ir en contra de la corriente general es algo sumamente incómodo. Puede que la mayoría de las miserias morales e intelectuales se cometan por eso: por no contradecir las ideas de tus patronos, de tus vecinos, de tus amigos. Un pensamiento independiente es un lugar solitario y ventoso.

Las chicas de hoy tienen una Lady Gaga, que se viste de hombre, de mujer o de filete de ternera, según le viene en gana.

I don't want to be a PULSATING PIECE OF PROTOPLASM!

Are you a male or a female or somewhere in between?

It's always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never ever want to end up like. We don't live the way you tell us to because we're afraid that if we do we'll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It's alright for you because you'll be dead soon anyway, but we've still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.

You might be a chicken or a human being, but show a little rebelliousness and the next thing you knew you were all on your own.

He's got five rings in his ear, eighteen gauge to ten gauge, but when I told him to get one in his nipple to match mine, and to get a Sailor Moon tattoo - because I like Sailor Moon? - or if not that, a skull, he stopped calling me.