Top 140 Karl Wiggins Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

53. “The Gypsies favour hazardous and threatening freedom over serene and tranquil servitude any day of the week.”

— Karl Wiggins

54. “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

55. “Due to the Jat uprising we missed our train to Shimla, which was a disappointment. Jats are fierce and lawless, and when they fight they don’t care if they live or die. So we opted for Mussoorie instead, where we found people more chilled out and mellow than any others we had met in India. The mountain air must do that for them.”

— Karl Wiggins

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Millwall fans are an earthy bunch, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but many of them lack social graces, and the demographics are far removed from architect’s impressions of the New Den, which is a superb ground.”

— Karl Wiggins

60. “I do have a sneaking admiration for anyone who has the intelligence to plan a ‘job’ properly and the courage to carry it out. As long as no one gets hurt and the target is a bank or an insurance company.”

— Karl Wiggins

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

80. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

82. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

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

— Karl Wiggins

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

88. “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

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

— Karl Wiggins

90. “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

91. “And remember this, Jimi’s music was originally Mississippi Delta blues. His influences were blues giants Muddy Waters and Albert King. But he fell head-over-heels in love with British rock. And so you have a guy who just didn’t fit in AT ALL.”

— Karl Wiggins

92. “For the most part policy-makers are too nervous about offending people, yet when BRITAIN really was GREAT that was the last thought on our minds.”

— Karl Wiggins

93. “Go searching for your own tribe! And at no time conceal or camouflage your true self. You never know who may be out there watching and trying to spot exactly who you are.”

— Karl Wiggins

94. “Whilst the food we eat nowadays has much to be grateful to the likes of Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Vasco De Gama, who would have introduced the tangy flavours of South Africa’s Rainbow Cuisine on his way around the Cape of Good Hope to India, Arabic cuisine, with spices of cinnamon, cloves, saffron and ginger was a lot more enterprising than Western cooking at the time. The medley of colours that the spices offered the food had mystical meanings to the Arabs.”

— Karl Wiggins

95. “If you’re fit and healthy and capable of mending a fence or stacking shelves, and you’re not doing either of those things, then I say you don’t get the right to vote. I don’t want someone who’s too lazy to get a job making decisions on how this country should be run.”

— Karl Wiggins

96. “Fergie always has a bit of sparkle to her, a bit of mischief in her eye. We all do, don’t we? Us Carefree Scamps? Fergie didn’t fit the mould. And for that, the Royal Family didn’t like her. But she didn’t care that they didn’t like her. When one window of opportunity closed, she simply threw a brick through the next window. And for that I like her.”

— Karl Wiggins

97. “On June 23rd 2016 we took the opportunity to abandon this sinking ship captained by failed politicians and unelected crooks. But we’ll still trade, we’ll still holiday abroad and America will still ask us to stand Shoulder-to-Shoulder with them in ‘their’ fight against terrorism.”

— Karl Wiggins

98. “Let’s be honest, Carefree Scamps have rarely been accused of being the epitome of virtue, and that’s because we intermittently break the rules. Yet despite this we are often charming enough for others around us to make allowances. “He’s just prone to being misled.”

— Karl Wiggins

99. “Janice Joplin was uninhibited and raw, a combination which when blended with her stormy and tempestuous lifestyle was irresistible.”

— Karl Wiggins

100. “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