Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Viv Albertine

I haven't found music comforting since the '80s, but it doesn't mean it's not good - it just doesn't work for me. It's shocking to me because music was my religion from the age of 11, and it's like I don't believe in my god any more.

I have a daughter. I have my imagination. I have friends. I, in no way, am going to louse that up with some idiot man, frankly. They drag you down - I'm talking about my generation of men.

Look at Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono - three really private people, but when they're on stage or when they're singing, they let go like no one else.

If my 18-year-old daughter asked me whether she should lead a truth-hunting, artistic, uncompromising life as I have done, I'd say no, don't do it. It's a difficult and lonely path for a woman.

I want to say to younger women especially that it's OK to be an outsider. It's OK to admit to your rage. You're not the only person walking down the street feeling angry inside.

I've only done a handful of things in my life that have stood out. The rest is just broth: mistakes and boredom.

The older I get, the more the lying, the losing touch with your true thoughts and feelings, and the compromises required to fit in seem not worth the effort. It's my one go on Earth; why spend any more of it conforming to other people's rules and ideals?

We used to have massively long discussions about how we should stand on stage. Should we stand with our legs apart? No, all the guys with guitars in skinny jeans stand with their legs apart, and you'd think, 'We can't stand like that.' We'd spend hours and hours, days and days, discussing how to stand.

I think I function well in most parts of my life but possibly not in that emotional side of my life.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

There are more and more of us women out there who won't be pushed around and will give back a lot more than was bargained for. You have to mean it, though.

I hate to say it, but one of the worst things you could be called when I was younger was unfeminine.

You've got one life: find your voice within it.

It's amazing what your brain can do when all your senses are heightened.

I can always go back to Jane Austen. 'Mansfield Park' is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.

When you've fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.

It's all very well for the Kinks and Damon Albarn to sing those songs and sneer at Mr. Nine to Five, but again, they're white men, so they didn't have it very hard.

My mother was so ignorant of what could have befallen me and was probably so exhausted - she was one of the first generation of single parents as well - that it was all a bit overwhelming. So the naivety of parents meant we did have a certain amount of freedom.

A lot of the men I've dated have been incapable of even basic kindness.

The more blows you have in life, the better, because it means you're challenging yourself.

I think, often, people who do something new creatively don't benefit financially from it - it's the people who come after and make them palatable that make money.

Punk was such an exciting time because there were no rules. You could go and knock on Sun Ra's door - and he was in the phonebook, under Ra!

People say you mellow as you get older, and I really haven't.

There's a fine line between brave and mad. But whatever I do, I go for it.

I'm very true to the old punk ethics of honesty and truthfulness and integrity... and still be authentic.

Most female artists - to do what you have to do and to be as honest as you have to be, to be as selfish as you have to be, as tunnel-visioned as you have to be to make art, not entertainment - you can't compromise, really.

With the second book, I didn't have an ideal reader in mind, as it developed quite out of my control, this detective novel of why am I so full of anger, why did I pick up a guitar when I was poor and uneducated.

I'm still angry at so much - class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.

I've had to fight for everything.

It's me who fixes the roof, unblocks the drain, and changes the plug. I'm Spartacus.

Female rage is not often acknowledged - never mind written about - so one of the questions I'm asking is, 'Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?' But I'm also trying to trace where my anger came from. Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think that it's empowering to ask that question.

I feel sorry for girls getting caught up in it and still thinking they have to define themselves and their success by being in a relationship, straight women, straight girls, by being in a heterosexual relationship or being in any relationship, as if that's in any way a mark of what kind of successful human being you are.

I could be completely mad and sound like David Icke, but I just find people with blue eyes colder, less passionate, and more calculated people.

I think young men and boys are taught to fail. It's nothing to them; they do sport, they fall over, they shout, 'I'm all right,' and carry on. But with girls, they're so appallingly embarrassed to fail, it's like it's considered unfeminine.

Girl bands still do just copy the way men move onstage. To me, that is so backwards, so un-radical.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

My favourite guitar was - I can't remember if it was '50s or '60s - a pale wood Telecaster, and it made me a better player. It was beautiful, so easy to play.

In the 1970s, girls didn't do anything. It wasn't their fault. For me and the other working-class girls I hung around with, our route was plotted - you were a secretary and a wife. I wanted to hitchhike around the world, go on motorbikes, be in bands.

I like to smell a book before I start it. I fold over the pages, write comments in the margins, leave it on the bed next to my pillow when I fall asleep.

I didn't pursue happiness at all. I've never pursued it. I wasn't brought up to pursue it.

We grew up during the 'peace and love' of the 1960s, only to discover that there are wars everywhere, and love and romance is a con.

We're so tribal in Britain about music. But my music - my guitar playing, the rhythms, et cetera - just express my personality, because I'm self-taught.

I'd like to be with someone kind who can hold a conversation and is in my age group. If that's too much to ask, I'll do without.

It is soul-destroying to have your work and physical appearance picked to pieces.

There was an angry wave in the '70s, a strong feminist angry wave. I remember thinking - oh my God - I thought it was the beginning of something, and it all went quiet.

If you've written something that moves you and frightens you, you just can't take it back.

I've never had any interest in reading the real-life stories of criminals. I don't want to get inside their heads.

When I was pregnant, I prayed that my daughter would have brown, green, or grey eyes.

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

Doctors didn't know if I would survive. The cancer was too big to operate on, so they blitzed it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

If you are an autodidact, you probably do write more in the rhythm of speech rather than having learnt prose.

Both my parents lived through a world war. My grandparents lived through two world wars. And they didn't go around saying, 'Look for happiness.'

I've burned all my bridges for the sake of getting as near as I can to the truth. And after years of searching for the truth, you find that that's all you can bear. The truth and nothing but the truth.

I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know, 'I was born in Acton, and I went to such and such a school.' They just bore me.

Strive to be different and better than what is already out there if you are creating - Benjamin Clementine does that.

During my childhood and teenage years, everything I knew was at war. My mother and father were at war. My sister and I were at war. I was at war with my atypical nature, desperately trying to fit in and be normal. Even my genes were at war - the cool Swiss-German side versus the hot-headed Corsican.

I think sometimes men find it easier to be a carer than an accessory. I mean, most women I know in bands are pretty lonely. Guys don't want to travel around with you. I know loads of women who do it, but guys don't do it. They're not brought up for it.

I always love a song about London or about places. I think Britain could do with more of them; America is so good at that.

We were very deliberately not playing 12-bar structures, blues structures, which rock musicians turned into such a cliche. We tried to... listen to the rhythms within ourselves and take the normal words we used every day in our normal thoughts, which girls hadn't written about before.

I didn't have many role models or interesting women to get stirred up by until Yoko Ono came along.