“Can I possibly believe that this deliberately barbaric sometime poet and her glorified garage band are worthy of comparison with Rimbaud, Jarry, Tzara, Gide, Mondrian? The short version of my answer is yes”
“Here at last was art with access to a contemporary, white, English-speaking proletarian culture. It posited kids whose very determination to survive took guts and whose unwillingness to give up the idea of victory was positively heroic”
“Hell really was the quintessential avant-punk. With no more irony than was mete, he presented his nihilistic narcissism not as youthful hijinx but as a full-fledged philosophy/aesthetic”
“Debbie Blondie herself has the Shangri-Las/Crystals girl group sound down to a perfect snotty whine, but unlike Patti Smith, she never comes across as snotty or pretentious.”
“I’m jumpin’ around and crawlin’ on the floor and realizin’ shit I’m better than those idiots up there. So I sez, ‘Hey if they can do it we can do it, right guys?’ ‘Right!’ ”
“When I first saw the Ramones I said, ‘This is the best band in the world.’ I went up to them after the set and ‘You
guys are great! You guys are great!’ That’s all I could say.”
