Richard Hell > Quotes

“In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.”
― Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“I walk in the sprinkling rain like a lion. Pretty soon there won't be lions anymore. If I have to die to be a lion I'll die. I'm roaring, but in the language of rain and sand: I am invisible, I blend in, and I'm not hungry so everyone is safe. I can just observe them, join them, I can admire them, I can pity them and love them. They're so pathetically beautiful I could cry. How could I ever forget that this world is gorgeous and interesting? Every little detail is a gateway to huge canyons of knowledge and understanding. And it's all so sexy. Nothing is restrained, everything is perfectly, ripely, ravishingly itself, and swollen with signs and information that link it in the web.”
― Richard Hell, Go Now

“It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.”
― Richard Hell, Go Now

“You realize there are certain things that you'll never do that you always thought would be part of your future. It's a big relief to discover what you are best suited for, and it's a real advantage to be able then to focus.”
― 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.”
― Richard Hell

“I think love is sort of a con you play on yourself. I think the whole conception of love is something the previous generation invents to justify having created you. You know I think the real reason children are born is because parents are so bored they have children to amuse themselves. They're so bored they don't have anything else to do so they have a child because that will keep them busy for a while. Then to justify to the kid the reason he exists they tell him there's such a thing as love and that's where you come from because me and your daddy or me and your mommy were in love and that's why you exist. When actually it was because they were bored out of their minds.”
― Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“Memories are better than life. Nothing I'm part of is good until later. I love what time does. I make decisions on the basis of sensing what will produce the best memory. They're my finest works: all that multidimensional and liquid maze of experience minus the fear and uncertainty, or with the fear and uncertainty changed to something else. Because they're already finished. I made them up and they comprise me. It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity jewels are pressed into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories. Usually it's better to get things over with so you have the memory. But like the best poems, they're also never really finished because they gain new meaning as time reveals them in different lights. Maybe every memory is inside you from the beginning; they erupt and branch and merge in fantastic patterns, but if you really tried you could trace any one of them back to the same original. Maybe the best ones are all the same: of being born. Or dying, or whatever it is.”
― Richard Hell

“it was a crime to take anything too seriously, as oppressed as we felt by the adult and conventional world. All the most serious art is not only sad but hilarious. What other intelligent way to live is there but to laugh about it? The alternative, also respectable, is suicide. But how could you do that? Not only would it betray a woeful lack of humor, but it would keep you from finding out what was going to happen next.”
― Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“Only time can write a song that's really really real
The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels
And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals”
― Richard Hell

“I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.”
― Richard Hell, Go Now

“Basically, I have one feeling... the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away... See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to... walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of 'here'.”
― Richard Hell

“I'm forever amazed at how much fun it is to leave. Just to leave. Arriving has its points, but leaving is inexhaustible.”
― Richard Hell

“I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born.”
― Richard Hell

“Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on.”
― Richard Hell, Go Now

“Creaky voice: I am the scientist of my moods. I. Observe. Myself. Microscopically. But it looks like... nothing's there...I write and shudder with effects of my handiwork beneath the microscope, thinking it must be God's work. I am nothing and I am God, therefore... How'd it come to this?
Never mind.”
― Richard Hell, Go Now

“Heroin possesses no negative qualities. You Asshole.”
― Richard Hell, Artifact! Notebooks from Hell 1974-1980: Notebooks from Hell, 1974-80

“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.”
― Richard Hell, The Voidoid