Karl Wiggins > Quotes

“Go to the community and the locations that have set a sparkle in your psyche. That's how you find your Tribe”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation”
― Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm

“As a Wrong Planet person you may at times appear to be unsociable. You’re often dispassionate when it comes to the activities of others because they seem so mediocre to you. You sometimes find it disappointing to make friends with people who you just can’t relate to. And because of this from time to time you find yourself alone, although you don’t mind this. It’s simply that people don’t always cut it for you”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I’m not interested in hearing from those who preach joy or talk such crap about ‘positivity pledges’ about not allowing negative thoughts to drain them of energy, or about sending vibes of positive energy into the world and being grateful for all the wonderful things it’s going to attract into lives.
That stuff’s all well and good, except that most people who talk shit like this are as fake as Katie Price’s boobs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“It’s plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we’re literary Gypsies, all of us, and it’s only recently that we’re starting to realise we’re not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I’ve always loved wild people.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread." Charles Caleb Colton 1825.”
― Karl Wiggins, Shit my History Teacher DID NOT tell me!

“For the Gypsy, it’s moments in time that count, not interpretations or rhetorical questions or resolutions or justifications, and not even the journey’s end, for the journey never ends. Just moments in time. They are born for disappearing”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“You’re not supposed to agree with everything I say. It’s okay to disagree. It doesn’t make you right and me wrong, and it certainly doesn’t make me right and you wrong. It’s just opinion. So it’s not whether you agree with my opinions or not that matter. What matters is that you respect them. And conversely that I respect your opinions. You can disagree with me, you can argue with me, and you can be different from me, but don’t ever try and shut me up.”
― Karl Wiggins, 100 Common Sense Policies to make BRITAIN GREAT again

“By the 'best minds' Ginsberg meant the dropouts, poets, musicians and world travellers, as opposed to doctors and lawyers. He understood that Wrong Planet people tend to pick up better communication skills, have greater visualisation, and can adapt to changing circumstances quicker than Rag, Tag & Bobtail.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There’s a huge difference between the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen and the rest of society in that no one understands us.

It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.

It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

No one understands us”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Gypsies have no boundaries. They have primitive, untamed personalities and 'that look in their eyes.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Choose carefully. Avoid Rag, Tag & Bobtail. Avoid those who play it safe. They won’t offer a helping hand, and they can’t advise you. They’re boring, and that’s just about all that can be said about them. They are dead and obsolete. That’s it. They exist, they happen, but they don’t actually live.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The Gypsies favour hazardous and threatening freedom over serene and tranquil servitude any day of the week.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There is nothing more annoying than somebody who is really thick but who believes with absolute conviction that he is more intelligent than you. In other words, they tend to be very self-contained, introspective and deep down they’re probably striving for affection. Yet they have no way of going about attaining this, so they tend to rub people up the wrong way.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Banks are nothing but old fashioned money lenders. They encourage you to borrow, to get in debt, and when you can't pay back the loan they take your home away. At least a money lender only breaks your legs.”
― Karl Wiggins, 100 Common Sense Policies to make BRITAIN GREAT again

“You see what your mother-in-law hasn’t yet realised is that she’s the one who needs to hold out the olive branch, not you, because she’s the one who’s going to want to come around more and more in the future to see her grand-kids. SHE needs to make friends with YOU, not the other way around.”
― Karl Wiggins, You Really Are Full of Shit, Aren't You?

“The problem you and I have, as Wrong Planet people, is not so much that we mean everything we say, but we expect that everyone else does to.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“A life coach? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything, does it?

So they ‘coach’ people on how to live their lives? Why don’t they mind their own fucking business? They only call themselves life coaches because they can’t get a job. Because they’re unemployable. And they haven’t got any qualifications either. Do you think they went to Uni to study life coaching? Of course they didn’t.

And who do they coach anyway? Do people go to them and ask to be coached on their lives? I hardly think so. They’d see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or someone with a bit of clout, wouldn’t they?

They don’t coach anybody at all, do they? They’ve made it all up.

So, there you have it. At the bottom end of the otherworldly, metaphysical scale, even less developed spiritually than Orphans or Horace, are Life Coaches.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“For a shy person it’s hard enough to overcome self-consciousness and establish personal relationships with others without having the additional hindrance of a well-meaning but misguided relative who only emphasises that person’s limitations”
― Karl Wiggins, You Really Are Full of Shit, Aren't You?

“Marilyn Monroe was a Carefree Scamp and she often felt like she didn’t belong, as if she’d somehow landed on the Wrong Planet. Clearly she wouldn’t phrase it that way, but throughout her life she was searching for members of her own tribe”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There will be times in your life when you need to remain low key. Not everyone needs to know everything about you. Not everyone deserves to know the real you. If they want to criticise you for who they think you are, then let them make that mistake. But you’re not responsible for their thoughts.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure”
― Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm

“♪♫ no one’s gonna play this on the radio ♫♪ Billy Joel

So why’s he wasting his time? Because he loves the music, that’s why. And he’s not wasting his time is he? He’s following his dream, doing what he loves. Perhaps if more of us followed our dreams – really followed our own dreams, not someone else’s nutty ideology - the world might be a nicer place to reside in.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I always like to think of Neal Cassady as being representative of the tarot card The Fool, which displays him at the outset of his journey with unlimited potential. The card also shows him about to step off a cliff and it’s clear he hasn’t planned things properly. He’s got a bag with him that contains all he needs, but he’s not bothering to open it. In his left hand he’s holding a white rose, which represents purity and righteousness. He’s got a little white dog with him, who’ll protect him on his journey, but will push him to learn life’s lessons.

The Fool represents crazy wisdom, for his journey may well be to discover advanced and contemporary ideas, new frames of reference, shocking concepts, knowledge or viewpoints. The Fool has holy curiosity.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I write in my head on the way home from work, or when mowing the lawn, or on a night out with friends. Sometimes I find the time to capture those words that are rolling through my mind, quivering and drumming and swimming, banging into each other until I can finally trick them and leak them out onto the page. And sometimes I don't. Writers are like that”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“We’re all familiar with the Hippie dress code. Long hair, beards, psychedelic colours, sandals, lots of beads, and the women could often be seen wearing long, flowery granny dresses. So much so in fact that it became a uniform. Hippies rebelled so much against inflexible dress codes that eventually they created their own rigid styles.

Hippies mutinied so much against conformity that over the course of time they were forced to play the game and comply with what everyone else was wearing. The counter-culture became a counter-counter-culture.

Everyone was the same”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The banking institutions, my friends, are sailing under false colours. They are running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. And we should never forget it.”
― Karl Wiggins, 100 Common Sense Policies to make BRITAIN GREAT again

“Your soul may well consist of artists and artisans, crooks and charlatans, writers and wanderers, poets and performers, vagabonds and visionaries, cigar box jugglers and contortionists, sword swallowers, storey-tellers and snake worshippers, fire eaters and fire dancers, human cannonballs, treasure hunters, swashbuckling pirates, pilgrims, Bedouin tribesmen and Gypsies. Everything that’s rash and wild inside of you is striving for freedom. And I’m not asking for this to hit you like an epiphany. It’s not supposed to. But if you read that list of misfits above and gave just the tiniest of nods – even at a deep subliminal level – then you understand”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“I call the polar opposites to Wrong Planet people Rag, Tag & Bobtail because they’re really nothing but glove puppets. Their heads are little more than hollow wood and at times they seem to be controlled by strings and rods and levers with invisible hands inside them making them ‘perform.’ Most glove puppets have fixed facial expressions and a hinged mouth, giving them a dull, lifeless expression.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe