Top 140 Karl Wiggins Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Wrong Planet people often look younger than everyone else.”

— Karl Wiggins

52. “With a horse and cart, a ferret, a dog and a gun, who could not be happy?”

— Karl Wiggins

53. “I think there’s something about certain people’s chosen ‘lifestyle’ which ages them. I can’t explain it any other way. Leaving school, building a career, getting old before their time as they take on more stress lacks that one essential element that we had oodles of as youngsters, and that’s fun. We had lively, buoyant and animated fun. We were carefree at an age when you’re supposed to be carefree. We were breezy, jaunty and happy-go-lucky.”

— Karl Wiggins

54. “Strange how the perspective changes with the point of view, isn’t it? Most people who claim to believe in the Bible don’t actually know what it says.”

— Karl Wiggins

55. “If you’re a black sheep or a tie-died sheep or a Carefree Scamp – I’d rather sit around the fire with you than the ‘decent, mediocre types’ any day of the week.”

— Karl Wiggins

56. “It seems to me that although they have a respectable sales pitch, this business of a priest having the power to let bygones be bygones and grant us absolution from our scandals is all just one gigantic scam to con loads of money off a haunted and gullible public.”

— Karl Wiggins

57. “Many parts of Watford, especially around Vicarage Road Football Stadium, consist of scuzy warrens of Victorian terraced houses.”

— Karl Wiggins

58. “If someone’s been signing on for six months with still no sign of finding gainful employment, then in order to continue to receive their Unemployment Benefit or Jobseeker’s Allowance they should complete at least 30 hours of compulsory work a week with the idea being that not only do they benefit their own communities, but this would also assist them in developing basic employability skills.”

— Karl Wiggins

59. “Why can’t unemployed people clean toilets, remove graffiti from vandalised war memorials, clear wasteland or derelict areas, or even decorate public buildings such as community centres. They could work in charity shops or down the local tip, sorting people’s rubbish out. They could even look after cemeteries, cutting the grass, hedges and shrubs, keeping gravestones clean, or maybe even laying paving slabs for a new path. Or how about putting in raised flower beds in the park?”

— Karl Wiggins

60. “Wrong Planet people are charismatic and attractive enough to evoke empathy even though they often recklessly defy norms and social conventions, they can get away with being villains, often with nothing more than a cheeky smile.”

— Karl Wiggins

61. “The practice of an offbeat and sometimes bizarre lifestyle, often in the camaraderie of compatible people was incredibly romantic in the 19th century when authors, artists and entertainers lived in the low-class, substandard Gypsy ghettos of Western Europe and were often regarded as nothing more than vagabonds, globetrotters, opportunists, con artists and charlatans. They also practiced an open sexual liberation regarded at the time as quite a new morality.”

— Karl Wiggins

62. “The Apprentice: the candidates’ combination of being desperate, totally pointless yet surprisingly pompous is extremely watchable.”

— Karl Wiggins

63. “I hold a beast, a celestial being and a maniac inside of me. It’s up to you which one you meet.”

— Karl Wiggins

64. “Life is the feel of a coral sunset over a slow-moving river. Memories of jungles and deserts and dark winds from Java. And if you really listen, you can still hear the high plains drums in New Mexico, for deep inside of you is the spirit of your past.”

— Karl Wiggins

65. “Sir Richard Francis Burton was a cross between Indiana Jones and Captain Jack Sparrow, with perhaps a little piece of the warrior-poet Aragorn from Lord of the Rings thrown in for good measure. Or maybe I should rephrase that; all these swashbuckling film heroes, including probably John Rambo, may well have been loosely based on Burton and his life.”

— Karl Wiggins

66. “A lot of people are wary of us because we’re a little offbeat, but deep down they long to be like us. Always remember that court jesters, Bohemian scribblers, and warriors share similar personality traits, for deep down all of us are Warrior-Poets.”

— Karl Wiggins

67. “All Romani dialects – about 60 in all – contain Armenian words, proof if you will that the Lom Bosha passed through Armenia in the early 11th century, trading spices along the Great Silk Road, that network of ancient trade routes connecting China with the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Romani traded Armenian carpets, silk, dyes, lapis lazuli and tin, and it’s no surprise that five capitals of Armenia are on The Great Silk Road.”

— Karl Wiggins

68. “There’s no doubt that at times Edie Sedgwick howled at the moon, but she knew her own power and she dignified the unvarnished truth of her existence. Her life was loose, baggy and sloppy, but completely uncaged, and you can’t ask more than that.”

— Karl Wiggins

69. “A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure.”

— Karl Wiggins

70. “There’s a craziness in Wrong Planet people that means we teeter on the edge sometimes. It’s what makes us interesting.”

— Karl Wiggins

71. “To produce new works a writer will use a kind of sixth sense as well as the logical process. He’ll enjoy playing with words, and that’ll help his brain to relax and produce better ideas. His study is where he discovers order and finds hidden meanings in the words. He’ll enjoy expanding the boundaries of what is feasible, and is possibly motivated more by the writing itself than by the hard cash that is the reward for writing.”

— Karl Wiggins

72. “This was an era where you were defined by the music you listened to and the clothes you wore. You wouldn’t find a skinhead listening to King Crimson, or a Rocker listening to blue beat or reggae. It wasn’t allowed.”

— Karl Wiggins

73. “Carefree Scamps are unconventional to the extreme but they get better results, and frequently their employers, who were often in two minds about offering them the position in the first place, eventually realise they’ve found a diamond, yet not only are they unsure how to handle them, they can seldom work out how specifically they accomplish their objectives because in one way or another they’re always rocking the bloody boat. The Carefree Scamp takes quite a bit of ’managing.”

— Karl Wiggins

74. “A lot of us for instance are very good at our jobs but absolutely hopeless at job interviews.”

— Karl Wiggins

75. “Through years of experience I’ve discovered that a liar will always look into his drink when telling a lie. But he doesn’t have a drink in a cab, and even if he did I’d have no idea as to whether he were looking into it or not.”

— Karl Wiggins

76. “They reminded me, however, of soldiers in the Crusades, the Wars of the Roses or the Norman Conquest. Thick, but willing to fight anyone if told to.”

— Karl Wiggins

77. “The banking institutions, my friends, are sailing under false colours. They are running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. And we should never forget it.”

— Karl Wiggins

78. “Why should you and I struggle to pay our bills while some pisshead dopehead wanker spends OUR money on getting wrecked?”

— Karl Wiggins

79. “Rag Tags, you see, are absolutely free to do as they please, which for the most part is to imitate each other. And you only have to take a closer look at most youth culture groups to verify that. Mods and rockers, skinheads and greasers, teddy boys, suadeheads, chavs, emos, goths etc. all fear that by being different they’ll be left out in the cold. That’s why they’re Rag Tags.”

— Karl Wiggins

80. “Think of Keith Moon next time you hear of a modern-day rock star tipping his bed over in a hotel room, or you watch some of these prankster programmes on the telly. It’s all been done before.”

— Karl Wiggins

81. “There is so much zest in life! It is perpetually and enduringly luscious.”

— Karl Wiggins

82. “If by now you are thinking of me as a nutcase, it’ll somewhat redeem me from being middle-of-the-road, which after all is what we’re all about. Not being so-so. Not being fair-to-middling. Not being run-of-the-mill.”

— Karl Wiggins

83. “Have patience with the byzantine can of worms that is you. Cluttered and sloppy and chaotic, you may be, but you’re easy on the eye and you’re getting warmer.”

— Karl Wiggins

84. “I’ve come to know him well, and have discovered that shrouded behind his touchy and volatile exterior, there crouches a warm and considerate human being, crying out to be valued and loved.”

— Karl Wiggins

85. “The Warrior fights before he’s taught how. He just fights, and if you hit him he steps forwards towards you.”

— Karl Wiggins

86. “Edie Sedgwick didn’t really fit in on this planet. She didn’t fit in anywhere. She’d spent years in mental institutions, she took far too many drugs and yet she was destined to make an impression on just about everyone who ever met her, so much so that they wanted to write about her, sing about her, put her photos on album covers and, of course, film her.”

— Karl Wiggins

87. “We crossed the Mississippi and on to Illinois. At Starved Rock, 100 miles south of Chicago, we followed 40 or 50 bikers with ‘Bikers against Child Abuse’ as their colours. Next was Indiana, with foggy river towns and vast farmlands, Amish homes in Ohio with smoke curling from the chimneys, then 43 miles of unbroken forests and prime trout-water rivers in West Virginia. We stayed overnight and ate fresh game pie, although whether we were eating possum, rabbit or raccoon we never discovered.”

— Karl Wiggins

88. “It’s almost as if Bronson, Ginsberg and Bowie craved the freedom of letting go, of pushing their mind aside and allowing the vampires and demons and all the other freaks to run them so that they could slip away elsewhere.”

— Karl Wiggins

89. “Cynthia was originally from Sierra Leone, and I loved the way those two dusky words rolled off her tongue. As we drove along I found myself fascinated with the deep “Oooooohhs” and “Aaaahhhhss” that made up her conversational speech patterns.”

— Karl Wiggins

90. “It’s a huge generalisation, and possibly unfair, but there is a nasty element to certain sections of the Millwall Crowd.”

— Karl Wiggins

91. “The Wrong Planet tribe are the pranksters, the court jesters, the comedians, the Bohemians, the flower children, the nomads and vagrants, the free spirits. Without these the world would be full of humans who are little more than robots.”

— Karl Wiggins

92. “We took thousands of photos and missed millions of others.”

— Karl Wiggins

93. “There is nothing more annoying than somebody who is really thick but who believes with absolute conviction that he is more intelligent than you. In other words, they tend to be very self-contained, introspective and deep down they’re probably striving for affection. Yet they have no way of going about attaining this, so they tend to rub people up the wrong way.”

— Karl Wiggins

94. “She didn’t belong on this planet, yet she somehow touched everyone who came into contact with her.”

— Karl Wiggins

95. “The incandescent, phosphorescent truth is that whatever you’re facing – bankruptcy, unemployment, loss of a spouse – isn’t going to kill you.”

— Karl Wiggins

96. “The world needs us right now, more than at any other time, which is why so many of us are here. We are the riotous, reckless and rebellious people who from time to time tilt the world on it’s axis a little bit. The world needs that.”

— Karl Wiggins

97. “The Warrior-Sage will get focused, turn the power on and concentrate on the job at hand. And by doing this he is an effective role model for others around him. One way or another, he will get the job done. And if he finds himself in a situation that he is unable to change he will simply shrug his shoulders, go inside himself and wait it out.”

— Karl Wiggins

98. “A real dish has grown from all the chefs who have combined their talents over the centuries to develop a meal with unique physical characteristics, for there’s not a chef on earth who can claim sole title to a particular dish. It will have typical Iberian or French features, but with traces of Indian, Celtic, Roman, Jewish and even Moorish culture in its savour, although food can’t possibly pass from one country to another without change.”

— Karl Wiggins

99. “The opinions, eloquence and articulacy of the man or woman on the street can often be as invaluable as precious stones.”

— Karl Wiggins

100. “Under no condition do you need to piddle away any time attempting to explain who you are to those wankers who act as if they’ve pledged to misinterpreting your very existence.”

— Karl Wiggins