103 Quotes by Tom Junod

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.

It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.

His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

I am not running for president, but I've always known if I ever did run for president - or local dogcatcher, for that matter - the boy I bullied would and should arise as a necessary ghost from my past.

I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.

Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh - mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork - to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week.

I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.