O.K., Im a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, — Lester Bangs

"By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock n roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death."

"The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get em up dancin. Its not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audiences mind with their pieties and their sense of "community," i.e., ram it home that youre one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth."

"John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once youve made your mark on history those who cant will be so grateful theyll turn it into a cage for you."

"The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the "superstar," and thats a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact its the very virus thats fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier that infests our culture from popstars to politics."

"The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it theres precious little to be seen."

"Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral."

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."