Quotes About The Nineties

“The Tote End (a large and foreboding terrace at Eastville) itself was demolished in the nineties. Sadly a monstrous Ikea store now stands in it's place. Where once tribes of youths performed their rites of passage and bodily fluids flowed in the name of love, hate and pride; Justin and Kate bicker over which wood flooring they should choose. It fucking kills me.”

— Chris Brown

“If you ask me, I think Jerry Springer destroyed the public image of the USA. I mean up to early in the nineties I still imagined it like it was presented in hollywoodfilms and stuff. But then, early in the 90's they started broadcasting that freakshow in the Netherlands, and that new idea of entertainment, where you put the biggest morons you can find on screen so you can watch it and feel superior. Later on, politics also discovered the same formula. We want politicians we feel superior to. The very idea of anything being 'better' or 'higher' than us makes people extremely uncomfortable.”

— Martijn Benders

“I'm sure you have drawers overflowing with panties the ladies throw at the stage. We saw you guys play down at Mon Brewing a few times. Way to keep the Nineties alive.”

— Jason Jack Miller

“If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.”

— Will Self

“Much else than liberalization has happened in the nineties (in India)”

— Jean Drèze

“In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state's dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state's progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present.”

— Thomas Frank

“One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I'd agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting.”

— Hilary Mantel

“No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.”

— Ezra Pound

“Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.”

— Kirk Hammett

“One of my favorite horror films of the Nineties was 'Event Horizon.'”

— Kirk Hammett

“But in the 'nineties young men desired something more sweeping and passionate, more bold and less bland.”

— Bertrand Russell

“There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I was a clubber in the Nineties. I went dancing every week.”

— Grant Morrison

“Something happened in the nineties. There was a shift. I don't want to blame it on grunge or the rise of indie - but that was basically it. It was seen as dirty and kind of ignorant to have these ambitions, to want to be a big band.”

— Brandon Flowers

“The campaign was also among the most heated in recent memory, or short -term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break; she in turn countered with statistics of the mess he'd create as Treasurer, in the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an "essential precursor" of the prosperity of the nineties , and that The Market, in its infinite, time -spanning wisdom, would choose / had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.”

— Greg Egan

“There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.”

— Carrie Brownstein

“I kind of dress like a boy from the nineties. I like wearing baseball hats. I just like to be really comfortable.”

— Mae Whitman

“Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I'm a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.”

— Chris Robinson

“I remember going to see those Adrian Lyne films when I was going to see movies in the nineties, and I was jealous he wasn't working at New Line.”

— Michael De Luca

“Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.”

— Jerry Saltz

“Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.”

— Jerry Saltz

“And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'”

— John Thorn

“When I first moved to London for university, I was already a big fan of Diesel because, in the nineties, Diesel was, like, the brand. The stores were the place to go. It wasn't workwear like Levi's or G-Star.”

— Nicola Formichetti

“All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?”

— Ozzy Osbourne

“Even in the nineties, when it was mad and there were photographers all around the house, it never occurred to me to send someone else out to get cigarettes. It took me five minutes - went for a walk, gave a wave, went back inside.”

— Noel Gallagher

“English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.”

— John Cleese

“I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.”

— Ronald Reagan

“The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.”

— Jerry Saltz

“In some ways, I feel like I was Nirvana's biggest fan in the Nineties. I'm sure there are a zillion people who would make that claim, but I was just so passionately in love with the music that it made me feel sick. It made my heart hurt.”

— Rivers Cuomo

“It's very difficult today for girls to become supermodels. There is a lot more competition, a lot of countries in the East have opened up so there are many more models than there were in the Nineties. Now they have to compete with famous actresses but also with, say, reality stars to be on the magazine covers.”

— Claudia Schiffer

“I went through a whole blues period in the Nineties, and that had some influence on 'Load' and 'ReLoad.'”

— Kirk Hammett

“I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?”

— Douglas Coupland

“My sound definitely pays a lot of homage to the Nineties, but not just the dance music. There's also breakbeats, R&B, the big ballads. It's that whole era infused with very modern sounds.”

— Kiesza

“I was a guy back in the Eighties who was one movie away from a huge career, which at that time didn't happen. In the Nineties, I worked a lot, but it was kind of, 'Get out there and dig and find things.' Then I guess 'The Rookie' and 'Far From Heaven' were referred to as my comeback.”

— Dennis Quaid

“The end of the Nineties was an unhappy Primus camp. I hit a creative stagnation that wasn't helping us forward, and the personal elements, it just was time to stop.”

— Les Claypool

“[H]e asked Renee, "What does rock and roll have today that it didn't have in the sixties?" Renee said, "Tits," which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl
that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way
hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do.”

— Rob Sheffield

“WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free.”

— Russell Brand

“Everything said about Gen Xers
both positive and negative
was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart enough to realize those values were unsatisfying, and (b) they were totally fucking lazy. Twenty-somethings in the nineties embraced a record like Nirvana's Nevermind because (a) it was a sociocultural affront to the vapidity of the Reagan-era paradigm, and (b) it fucking rocked. Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b) they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true.”

— Chuck Klosterman

“When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!”

— Dennis Hopper

“It's really fascinating. I've never spent time in a place where they lost the wars, so it was interesting and I didn't know much about the history of the country. I didn't know they were under communist rule until the nineties. It's this whole attitude of being defeated, and frowning on optimism and American way of thinking. If we were laughing, Hungarian kids would be like "You're so American."”

— Evan Jones

“[On the socialites in New York in the Nineties who devoted themselves to politics, charities, and other volunteer work:] I never knew but one woman who devoted her life exclusively to the social game. She ended her days arranging dinner parties with paper dolls, a breakdown pitiful to watch.”

— Margaret Case Harriman

“I always say to people, the Eighties were so inventive because people wanted to stand out. By the time we got to the Nineties, everyone wanted to fit in. It was all about having the same pair of trainers and the same pair of jeans. That's fatal. Whereas the Eighties you would never be seen in the same pair of jeans that somebody else was wearing.”

— Nick Rhodes

“All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.”

— Carolyn Wells

“In the nineties, it was all women being blonde and from Sweden. But now it's changed: it's all men looking like Ellen DeGeneres.”

— Pablo Francisco

“We also have to acknowledge that there are Millennials who don't know of the Clintons of the nineties, and we've always suspected that once they found out that ... I mean, Bill Clinton's behavior was celebrated by Democrats in the nineties. Even by the feminazis!”

— Rush Limbaugh

“The Democrat Party today is not enamored of Bill Clinton. They may not even be enamored of Hillary [Clinton]. But the things that jazzed Democrats back in the nineties are nowhere near the things that jazz the Democrats of today.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“I have very eclectic taste in music. I like everything from Nirvana, which is featured in the film, to world music, to orchestral and jazz. For me, the nineties were about Oasis, because I was travelling around Britain when that band exploded onto the music scene.”

— Isla Fisher

“Sex in the nineties is boring. The problem is that it has gone from an active act to a spectator sport. We watch people make love on television and in films. We call 900 numbers to hear what someone would do to us if they weren't sitting in a boiler room of other dirty talkers reading from a prepared script.”

— Erma Bombeck

“The thing about eyewear is that it is so potent, There are very few accessories that, if you were not wearing anything, if you put on they would date you to a whole era. You could look the Thirties, the Fifties, and the Nineties just by your eyewear. It's like a pair of shoes because it is sculptural. It exists without a face. It tells a lot about where you are architecturally or aesthetically in a particular period in time.”

— Tom Ford

“I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them”

— Dave Grohl