89 Quotes by Lester Bangs

The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don't find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.

I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.

It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that, then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics.

What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.

At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides.

Things do go in cycles so I never believe rock was really dead it was really finished or had it, it just comes back in a different form.

I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.

A young woman is dead. I don’t care. You probably don’t care. The police don’t care. The papers don’t care. The punks for the most part don’t care. The only people that care are (I suppose) her parents and (I’m almost certain) the boy accused of murdering her.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.