words.amniisia.com

... the kid who wouldn't kneel during church services (I've never understood why this refusal so upsets the religious, just as I've never understood the inability of people who are dancing to leave alone those who are not. My theory is that both the worshippers and the rug-cutters fear that they appear ridiculous, and that this concern will be assuaged if they can compel everyone else to participate in their nonsense.)

It is probably an unsolvable problem, but it cannot be beneficial to humanity that every man is an aching disappointment to his teenage self.

It's amazing that more successful musicians don't go completely loopy. They are heroes, villains, cameos and clowns in the internal dramas of millions, with no opportunity to rewrite their lines or resign from the production. Most of us only matter that much to people to whom we can try to justify ourselves.

I was pathetically thrilled that I'd inspired outrage in people I'd never met on the other side of the world. It's one of the enduring joys of writing for a living - the opportunity to disrupt or direct, however trivially or fleetingly, the internal monologues of strangers.

Almond was thirty-four when we met, therefore nearing that age when the songs you've grown up with start feeling less like prayers of aspiration, and more like statements of reproach or measures of disappointment.

Examining anything up close is rarely as glorious or giddying as revering it from afar ...

The journalist is in the priviliged position of being everybody else's spy in the places everybody else can't go, but everybody else has a responsibility to judge the information retrieved.

This isn't as fatuous a statement as it sounds : a lot of famous people, in the cold light of reality, look nothing like they do on television, or at least can get away with not looking quite like they do in magazines. The hair alone ensures that Robert Smith is unmistakeable. Robert Smith, possibly uniquely, has a famous shadow.

'Some people think singers can do anything, I know that... but leave us to the big miracles'

'The thing to remember,' she says before she vanishes, 'and this is important, is that I'm driven. I really am. I'm driven for some reason. But I don't know where I'm going.'

'People today don't think. They are told the present is the only possible present.'

'You must not find yourself tiptoeing.'