A Quote by Lester Bangs

I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can't afford the ticket prices.
I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.
You’re going to tell me that last night shouldn’t have happened.” No. I’m glad it happened. For too long, I’ve been telling myself that I could spend all this time with yo and flirt with you and not have it mean anything. It does mean something. You mean something to me. But I’m not in love with you.
It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen --4000 dead and starving lying around-- and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp --it didn't mean a thing.
I think when you leave a band in any situation that you are a part of.. I mean, when I was with It Bites I was a quarter of something, and when I was with Robert Plant I was a sixth of some- thing and when you leave you become the whole thing. So just after you spend time realizing what you are, and it just happened that I was doing that in my life as well as musically, it kind of happened at the same time. I was getting to a point in my life where I was beginning to realize who I am, and I like me.
Couples in their 30s are having trouble having kids. And you just kind of extrapolate that and say, 'What if it happened to everybody? What kind of society would it be like if all of a sudden we knew that this was the end of the line - we couldn't have kids?'
What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.
What I would do is when I was younger I would draw in a sketch book something that happened in my life and then write a little something on the side about what happened or what the story.
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.
Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.
Every good thing that has happened in your life happened because something changed.
Imagine if it happened to you: All of a sudden you find this thing on your wrist and people are telling you it has powers. I would be a little skeptical myself.
I would like to know that when I read the paper in the morning, it's telling me something that actually happened, and I think the vast majority of journalists want the same thing.
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It's much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.
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