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John S. Hall

66 quotes

“I am not successful and I probably never will be. I look around and I see successful people, and I see that they have something I don't—success. Perhaps they were born that way, or perhaps they figured something out that I can never seem to learn. I don't know. That's why I'm not successful.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't make people change, and I can't change myself. I can't change the political climate, or fix the myriad problems of the world, or make anyone else happy. When I think about these things, I feel impotent and sad. When I don't think about them, I am running away from the truth. Either way I lose.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I feel I do know what to believe in. Sometimes I believe in working, writing, performing, doing the work. Other times I'm full of despair and I don't even believe in that, but for some reason I will get out of bed and do something anyway, even though I don't believe in it.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it is considered bad to be clever, because I think people usually assume that a clever person or a clever band doesn't have substance, doesn't really care about anything. People want music that matters, that believes in something, I think, whether it expresses anger or despair or love. People want to believe that their artists are portraying emotions that they really feel. And I think that's true of Patsy Cline, Johnny Rotten, whoever you want to name. If you believe the artist, you're going to go for it.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the stuff I write, probably 75% never gets recorded. Sometimes it's because I've read it at shows a few times to lukewarm response. But usually it's because I think it's not right. I will sometimes rewrite the same idea a few times before it feels good. I do this as opposed to taking a piece and tinkering with it in an effort to make it right. The earlier drafts wouldn't (and shouldn't) get recorded, because they're not as good.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think these are some of the common themes [of my work]: a) life is hard, brutal, capricious and unfair, b) sometimes there is a benefit to seeing it clearly, and acknowledging it truthfully..., and c) other times it is best to find something to laugh about, lest despair crush one completely. I find a lot of humor in shocking or so-called taboo things: castration, excrement, violence (usually self-inflicted or inflicted on the narrator, "[Martin] Scorsese" being an exception), sex and sexual perversions... etc.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Mark Prindle, 2003 (link)
“Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I wanna know about the commercial I saw on TV: An Irish guy walking through a field of green, whistling one of those Irish jigs, and a woman walks up and says, "Manly, yes, but I like it too." Then the guy pulls out a huge knife and cuts off his first two fingers and somehow catches them in what's left of his left hand and hands them to the woman. Did I mention they're both dressed in green? They they both sing this song together: "Are ya icky? Are ya sticky? Are ya hot as anything? Hey! Cut off two of your fingers, and stab yourself in the eye!" Then he stabs himself in the eye and hands her the knife, and she stabs herself in the eye, okay? Okay? So what about that?”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it's time we so-called "sensitive men" stopped kidding ourselves with all this crap about how guys in the Marines and garage mechanics and just generally, you know, macho guys—about how they're insecure about their masculinity because they have little dicks, because that's crap, and we know it. Guys in the military, construction workers, football players, they all have bigger dicks than you and I, and we might as well just accept it. Because it's stupid and dishonest for us to go around implying that us literary, intellectual, politically aware, feminist-type men are actually more confident than the insensitive, sexist, brute-type men because size doesn't matter, and even if it did, we have the bigger dicks, because this is bullshit. I think it's high time we all took a good hard look at our dicks and faced the music.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look. I'd be the first to admit that I don't have an ounce of common sense, but I think people should be fucking in the streets. Assfucking. Especially women fucking men in the ass with dildos. What this country needs is a lot more sodomy. Because there are a lot of crises a-coming: global warming as we rape Alaska for oil, the return of coathanger abortions, downward economic spirals, nuclear terrorism, the reemergence of "Burn the motherfucker down," "Fuck the police," "Blow it all up and let's start all over again"—it will be a dark and frightening time. And our retarded president will offer little solace or hope. If you think things cannot get any worse, you have no imagination and no sense of history.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's all this possibility out there, and it's gotta make you wonder, what's wrong with you? That time that God spoke to you and showed you the way, clear as day, and you were like "No way; too much work; I'm busy; I'm too tired; I don't even believe in you anyway; what's in it for me?" Well, you fucked up, didn't you? You sell your soul to the devil, you get like four dollars, but if you had come when God called, you would have gotten whatever you want—a nose job, a fifty-inch TV set, a waterbed filled with Calista Flockhart's urine, whatever you want. But you said no to God, and now you'll never get to go out with Christina Ricci. You'll never get a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car that can float and fly. You'll never get to visit Mars, or the future, or Marrakesh.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“William Rehnquist—I hope you die a slow and painful death. Sandra Day O'Connor—die a slow and painful death. Clarence Thomas—I hope you die slowly and painfully. Antonin Scalia—die with pain, slowly. Justice Kennedy—I forget your first name—I hope your death is painful and slow. President Bush—I hope you die so slowly, and with pain. Dick Cheney—die painfully slow, with slow pain. John Ashcroft—die slowly, painfully. You are all criminals. You will never go to jail. So just die, as soon as possible, with great pain, slowly. I would die the slowest, most painful death of all of you if it meant that just half of you would die now. Call me liberal, call me twisted and sick, I don't care. I hate you all and I hope you all die.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes if you go to see a very, very, happy movie, a Hollywood movie, you can walk out of the movie and feel very depressed because it's so false. And other times you see a very depressing movie and it makes you feel good, happy because you've seen something real. You've seen something that talks to you and says that your bad feelings are legitimate. And then you can go further with that and say, "Well, this bad feeling is good, and this good feeling is bad, but is it good to feel bad and is it bad to feel good?" I'm concerned with feelings. And sometimes when I feel good, I'll write something very negative because I have the strength to do it. But when I really, really feel very bad, what I want to do is make myself feel better, so I'll write something happier.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I don't like to make judgments about what people like sexually. Some people like one sex, or the other, or they like fat people, or they like to be tied up, whatever. That's fine. Whatever people like is fine by me. I think that's important, too, because in this country a lot of people want to make laws about that and I'm very much against that. Making certain kinds of sex illegal... To me that's immoral, to illegalize things that people want to do. Same with religious things. I think people should be able to believe whatever they want to believe. I think that when governments try to get involved with that sort of stuff, you're really destroying people's souls. I don't make statements like that in my songs because that's not what I want. I don't want to make a political statement.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, ca. 1992 (link)
“Some of the [band's] work has a genuine feeling behind it. Some of it is probably just being funny for the sake of being funny. Obviously, there are elements to "Detachable [Penis]" about male identity that are there, but not really overtly there. For the person who wants to find it, it's there. I don't know. I don't think... I like to think I'm not obvious about the humor, and I'm not obvious about the feelings, either. There's a certain degree of subtlety to what I'm doing; even in very obvious things, there's something underneath that's interesting. I think [the band is] guilty of being clever at times, to the detriment of conveying something more important, more real, more honest. I'll cop to that. But I will also say that there's also stuff that does have meaning.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Stephen Thompson, The A.V. Club, November 11, 1998 (link)
“When the [Mystical Shit] CD first started to take shape, I was very unsure about what was happening—I wasn't sure I liked what these guys were coming up with. I missed Dogbowl's melodies, and I didn't like that it was loud. But other people seemed to like it a lot, and at that time, that was important to me, so I went with it. As time went by, I started to appreciate the oddity of me in a rock band. Unfortunately, I didn't really embrace the idea fully until that band had broken up. Nowadays, I can look back and think it was fun and funny that I was in a rock band, but at the time, it bothered me a lot and I complained about it all the time, but I lacked the moral character to do anything about it.”
John S. Hall (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source