165 Quotes by Viv Albertine

I say something provocative to Posh Boy, he threatens me with violence, and the next thing I know, Sid's whipped off his studded belt, wrapped around his fist and smashed Posh Boy over the head with the buckle end. Splits his head open. (Sid taught me this move: wrap the tongue of the belt round your hand, use the buckle as the weapon, it's important to lock your arm straight whilst you wield the belt, and do the worst thing you can think of first. That’s the only chance you’ve got.)

I wonder how much self-control and acting (mothers are very underrated actors) it took for her to quickly arrange her gestures into a composed expression and modify her voice so she sounded calm and reassuring.

Then it occurred to me that there are two types of people: those who wait for the whole two lanes of a road to be completely clear before they venture across and those who risk it and charge into the middle, not knowing when they’ll get the chance to make a run for it to the other side. Neither is better than the other. The first one will have fewer problems and fewer adventures, and the second one will have more adventures and make more mistakes.

You try all your life to be an adult, but something deep down inside you will always be that child.

One day Sid turns up in the peg trousers and they're in ribbons. He'd sliced them up with a razor blade because he hated them so much but he couldn't find his jeans so when he wanted to go out he had to stick them back together. He joined the rips with loads of safety pins, all the way down his legs, hundreds of them. That’s how the ‘loads of safety pins’ thing started amongst people in clubs: they copied it, but he only did it because he couldn’t be bothered to sew his trousers up.

Until now, I haven’t really been rejected because the way a girl usually lets a guy know she likes him, with looks, hints, smiles, telling a friend of his, means we don’t directly experience rejection. And the first couple of times it happens to me, it hurts. But after a while, I think,Oh well, I’ve filled my quota. On to the next one.

You never look at your plate with disappointment here, eating seems to be a penance back home [in England] but in America they make food fun.

I’ve never regretted letting someone go who was taking the piss, although sometimes I miss them for a couple of months. I think you can get a bit addicted to people and often these piss-takers are good fun to hang around with. In the end, the ‘relationship’ isn’t worth the damage that’s done to your self-respect, though.

I used to drink occasionally when I was with Eryk. It made our time together dreamlike – sometimes life needs a bit of a nudge to live up to our expectations.