"High Fidelity" Quotes

What came first? The music or the misery?

People worry about kids playing with guns and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands — literally thousands — of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

The problem is, I've got no guts. So consequently I'm not willing to go out there and say what's really on my mind. And that inability to articulate what I'm feeling makes me feel like I'm going mad.

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker to hold the attention (I started with 'Got to Get You Off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side on the grounds of repetition unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and... oh, there are loads of rules.

How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your shirt. I have a hole in my world.

Sometimes I fantasize about myself being one of those people who is just thankful for what he's got—like the guy on the TV who smiles all the time. I want to be like that—and I am, really, and I should be thankful—right? Because I've got almost everything I want. But when I put which is to say ‘bank,’ I mean ‘self’ into my computer and ask for a rundown of my assets, it just seems to say ‘error.’

Top five musical crimes perpetuated by Stevie Wonder in the '80s and '90s. Go. Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins? Is it better to burn out or fade away?

You're very brave, riding on the bus in the age of the internal combustion engine.

It's not what you're like, but what you like that's important.