Richard Hell Quotations

There are characters in it that do deliberately go as far as they can in certain kind of taboo areas,

I was going to try to evoke the atmosphere that excited me without trying to actually depict it, ... The main idea was to talk about people for whom poetry was the highest value. ... I just knew I wanted to talk about this kind of way of life, and then it occurred to me to do the Rimbaud-Verlaine thing.

It's great for me to move on from that, ... And I'm glad I survived, to be able to.

I've come to think of myself as a writer of books.

There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same.

Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways.

I usually don't think of anyone ever suspecting that I might be someone who'd cry at stuff. I cry at movies all the time. And sometimes it really pisses me off because I hate it when they're just jerking my chain and it's just like completely manipulative.

I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. You don't know how much you can trust your memory. You don't want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

You realize there are certain things that you'll never do that you always thought would be part of your future. It's a big relief to discover what you are best suited for, and it's a real advantage to be able then to focus.

I decided I wanted out because it was killing me, and I couldnt see where to go with it that wouldnt be fatal.

I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam War and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

I believe in people treating each other with respect.

I love a good play, but they're too hard to find.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.

Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

Well, I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop. They came in and topped everybody, for sure. They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

The purpose of rock n' roll is to convince girls to pay money to get close to you.

There are characters in [punk] that do deliberately go as far as they can in certain kind of taboo areas.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

I'm usually alone or asleep, at home.

I do everything halfway, a thing of which adults disapprove, but things done halfway are deceptive, and in a class of their own – for instance, the sun is really twice its size.

In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

we still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.

If you take text and image and you put them together, the multiple readings that are possible in either poetry or in something visual are reduced to one specific reading. By putting the two together, you limit the possibilities. Text and image don't always work together in the way music and song lyrics become part of each other.