Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Jim Goad - Page 2

I don't think fatherhood's changed me so much as it's conjured protective instincts I've had all along.

Though your major media kept smacking me upside the head with the word "multicultural," you goddamned Australians are the most racist bunch of people I've ever seen in my life.

What's good and bad, sweet spirit, are in the eye of the beholder.

I think that any time a person comes face-to-face with their own mortality - close enough to Death that they can smell its breath - they have a choice: 1) Fall to pieces; 2) Reassemble yourself and keep walking.

I'll hit anyone who's seriously threatening my life... that's what happened, and that's what sent me to prison.

I write to please myself.

I don't regret any of my transgressions, because I believe I paid for them a million times over.

The idea that the reader is important enough to me that I'd tailor my words to either please or offend them always seems amusingly alien to me.

Plenty of people have bad divorces, but few of them end up with cancer, imprisonment, and public scorn. In the dark, rolling, treacherous wake of that sunken ship, the last thing I sought was a "relationship" or, heaven forbid, marriage.

I believe that to some degree there are situational and psychological laws of cause-and-effect, but I don't believe there's some Über-soul who doles out "justice."

Mind you, I live in an area of Atlanta that is nearly 88% black. But in six days in and around Melbourne, I saw maybe three people of African origin and maybe one easily identifiable Australian aborigine.

When I write, I strain with every wizened fibre of my weathered frame to analyze every possible angle of any given subject.

You truly need to witness me goo-gooing and coo-cooing and making up goofy little songs to glean a full appreciation of how nauseating I can be. This is another instance where things seemingly don't add up - how can this vile, hateful, violent, misogynist, racist, loathsome, repugnant, worthless, reprehensible subhuman be so insanely tender and kind to little doggies and kitty-cats?

I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.

Have you ever taken a sober look at any of the mutants who run these Hollywood-gossip sites? What a crew! None of them could ever, ever be stars, which is why they're always trying to "take the piss" from those they envy.

I don't think it's entirely paranoid to suspect that one day, you won't be able to so much as question the primary tenets of anti-racism without going to jail.

I've noticed that if you spend ten years without shooting dope, people consider you an ex-junkie, but one never is considered an 'ex-woman-beater.'

What are a genuine pain in the ass are all the misconceptions and outright lies. I read somewhere that in 2004 I was homeless in Seattle and drinking heavily, which came as a shock since I've never been homeless and haven't had a drink since 1982. I've also heard SEVERAL times that I'm a card-carrying member of several white-supremacist groups, when the last group I belonged to was the Boy Scouts.

the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.

I'm the only convict who couldn't get into Australia.

You have to be careful because those feelings and bitterness can take over and consume in a bad way.

I'm arrogant enough to tell you that I'm smart enough to have scored higher on my Scholastic Aptitude Test than any US president whose SAT score has been made public. I even scored higher than ex-presidential candidate Al Gore, whose SAT score was so high, it was deemed as potentially off-putting to voters.

I never want to think or write about the topic again when I'm finished with it.

In my long, long years toiling around the publishing industry, I've found that women simply don't stick to the writing with the same fervor that men do.

I'll argue anyone into the dust when it comes to facts.

The idea of "karma" reeks of primitive religious superstition, so I don't place a lot of stock in it.

I was exposed to violence while I was still in the womb - my father punched my mother in the stomach while she was pregnant with me.

If anything, I've probably tended more toward humor in my writing and veered more toward pleasure in my personal life.

What's absolutely impossible to prove is the idea of innate and everlasting equality.

My oldest brother was stabbed thirty to forty times and strangled to death with his own belt when I was eight years old. Much of my life has been pockmarked with violence. So I had a natural interest in the topic, along with a strong home-field advantage.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.

I certainly didn't emerge from prison regretting anything I ever wrote, nor did I feel remorse for my crime in the least.

I'm alive, happier than I've ever been, and I'm doing exactly what I want.

I definitely don't know why men are turned-on by lesbianism.

Unlike the vast majority of people, I've been locked in a box like an animal and I've also been on the receiving end of bloody thrashings, so I feel uniquely qualified to judge which is worse.

I could have completely lost my mind or became a junkie or abandoned all sense and judgment and committed some rash, stupid act that would have sent me right back into the cage. Instead, I chose to be happy - but not so much for the sake of happiness as for spite.

More than most, I believe I'm highly attuned to how heresies eventually become mainstream belief systems and how the vast majority of people who consider themselves 'edgy' are those who only embraced radical ideas LONG after it became safe for them to do so.

I'm developing a mild rash at the idea of "plugging" anything, because it's not how I roll.

One of the greatest pleasures I get from my measly professional career is confusing people. "Wait - he beats women and seems like a Nazi, but he has impeccable grammar and keen reasoning skills and sings country music and can, from time to time, say or do something really funny?" It absolutely doesn't compute for them. I enjoy that immensely.

I'm still an obsessive personality, and I still think I'm right, and I still believe my literary balls hang far lower than nearly anyone else's alive.