Paul Schrader Quotes

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.

That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.

Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.

How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'

Every generation challenges the one that goes before.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.

Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the tick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

The younger generation is supposed to rage against the machine, not for it. They're supposed to question authority, not question those who question authority.

When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.

If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.

You're 25 and you're looking at adults of your parents' age and older saying, "I don't want to live that way," and this is how it happens. It evolves slowly and it's not the result of any movement. It's just young people look at the way their parents are living and if they don't like it they don't want to duplicate it.

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

We know that inevitably the millennials will get old and tired again, and then there will be the bilennials or trilennials, or whatever the next generation is, and we're all going to end up on our lawn shaking our fists in a bathrobe yelling at the moon.

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.

What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.