58 Quotes by Richard Hell

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.

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

Oh Alabama! You make us so happy. What a playground. Without a word you remove the lake from around your neck and place it on mine. Emeralds. Diamonds. Rubies. Alabama, thank you, ma’am.

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.