Rob Sheffield Quotes
-
The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.
→ -
Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
→ -
You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
→ -
Just as Bowie, Zeppelin, etc., became rock stars by remaking themselves in the image of the California girls, the Go-Gos became rock stars by pretending to be the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. Jane Wiedlin always said her biggest influence was growing up in L.A. as a Bowie girl.
→ -
I will always love the Clash, because I loved them so much when I was fourteen, and I love how you can start a conversation with almost literally any dude about the Clash.
→ -
It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I'd ever known.
→ -
Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.
→ -
'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
→ -
We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.
→ -
'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.
→ -
Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the 'Parks and Recreation' squad, more than just the funniest character on TV - he's the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire.
→ -
In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.
→ -
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
→ -
A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
→ -
'Revenge' is a shameless soap in the style of Eighties shoulder-pad slap-offs like 'Dallas,' 'Dynasty' and 'Falcon Crest.' Yet there's no wink-wink camp.
→ -
If all music did was bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.
→ -
Most of an award-show host's job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it's the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel's 'Hero Dog Awards.'
→ -
You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.
→ -
Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.
→ -
When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
→ -
I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.
→ -
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
→ -
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.
→ -
The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right.
→ -
When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
→ -
One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds.
→ -
I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.
→ -
Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.
→ -
Ronnie Spector's hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La's combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade.
→ -
Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.
→
Related Authors
-
Nick Hornby Novelist -
David Sedaris Humorist -
Richard Meltzer Musical Artist -
Sloane Crosley Writer -
Malcolm Gladwell Journalist -
Dave Eggers Writer -
David Fricke Editor -
Will Hermes Broadcaster -
Bret Easton Ellis Novelist -
Jann Wenner Publisher -
Sarah Vowell Author -
Chuck Palahniuk Novelist -
Greil Marcus Author -
Jonathan Lethem Novelist -
Julie Klausner Author -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Bill Simmons Sports Columnist -
Ellen Willis Essayist -
Chuck Eddy Journalist -
Chuck Klosterman Author