Top 100 Rob Sheffield Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Somtimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until its too late.”

— Rob Sheffield

52. “But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week” – beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation.”

— Rob Sheffield

53. “Ronnie Spector’s hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La’s combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade.”

— Rob Sheffield

54. “It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers’ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers’ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.”

— Rob Sheffield

55. “You can’t beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.”

— Rob Sheffield

56. “We all get as miserable as Erika M. Andersen sometimes, but we rarely approach her musical-ideas-per-miserable-minute ratio.”

— Rob Sheffield

57. “When you’re a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you “offer it up”, as a sacrificial gift.”

— Rob Sheffield

58. “You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends.”

— Rob Sheffield

59. “You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.”

— Rob Sheffield

60. “Like most fans of ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ I wouldn’t know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.”

— Rob Sheffield

61. “I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be.”

— Rob Sheffield

62. “The important thing isn’t that we’re freakazoidal about the same things – it’s that she’s as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can’t help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn’t. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it’s only natural there will be lots of angles where they don’t connect at all.”

— Rob Sheffield

63. “One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds.”

— Rob Sheffield

64. “That’s the secret of ‘True Blood’ – all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can’t have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.”

— Rob Sheffield

65. “I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.”

— Rob Sheffield

66. “Hometown Aerosmith fans are different from other Aerosmith fans, and that mainly has to do with Joe Perry. It’s tough to overstate his strange grip on the local psyche. Tyler is a star who belongs to the whole world, but Perry, that dude belongs to Boston.”

— Rob Sheffield

67. “You’d think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America’s sweetheart on the ‘Today’ show. But her ratings have been dismal – she comes in last place every week.”

— Rob Sheffield

68. “I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.”

— Rob Sheffield

69. “I will always love the Clash, because I loved them so much when I was fourteen, and I love how you can start a conversation with almost literally any dude about the Clash.”

— Rob Sheffield

70. “Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. ‘Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and stuck in a nowhere town was very heaven. It was our time, the first one we had to ourselves. It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that’s what times do.”

— Rob Sheffield

71. “We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can’t. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people’s psychic hearts.”

— Rob Sheffield

72. “Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.”

— Rob Sheffield

73. “Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one.”

— Rob Sheffield

74. “Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she’d retired the day after she recorded ‘I Feel Love’ in 1977.”

— Rob Sheffield

75. “At that moment, I knew she was the girl for me. Of course, we’d already been going out for a few weeks, so I wasn’t, like, shocked or anything. But still, it’s never not nice to to keep realizing.”

— Rob Sheffield

76. “That Jim Morrison song gets it all wrong. People are strange when you’re a stranger, but it’s not because they ignore you – it’s when they notice you and smile, that’s when you realize you’re alone out here. Their kindness is what makes you notice how weak you are. That’s when you know it’s not the city’s fault, it’s yours. These people are in the same strange town, but they’re not letting the strangeness eat them up and turn them into robots. That’s just you.”

— Rob Sheffield

77. “So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don’t bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to offer. Is there such a thing as romantic love that does not depend on someone embracing my deficiencies? I hope I will never find out.”

— Rob Sheffield

78. “But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.”

— Rob Sheffield

79. “You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.”

— Rob Sheffield

80. “It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That’s how old hippies became Yanni fans.”

— Rob Sheffield

81. “When Renee and I talked about it years later, we agreed on one point: We were insane. Renee always said, “If any of our kids want to get married when they’re twenty-five, we’ll have to lock them in the attic.” We were just kids, and everybody who came to the wedding party was guilty of shameful if not criminal negligence – look at the shiny pretty toaster, isn’t it cute to see the babies playing with it in the bathtub? Jesus, people!”

— Rob Sheffield

82. “Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.”

— Rob Sheffield

83. “I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history.”

— Rob Sheffield

84. “Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that’s just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that’s been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.”

— Rob Sheffield

85. “Singing what’s in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you’ll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There’s no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that’s an option? You clearly aren’t listening to enough Morrissey songs.”

— Rob Sheffield

86. “Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs were believable and real life isn’t.”

— Rob Sheffield

87. “There are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one.”

— Rob Sheffield

88. “One of the best moments of any Liars show is hearing the crowd squawk ‘We’re doomed! We’re doomed!’ on cue during ‘We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own.’ Maybe not the most uplifting audience sing-along in the indie rock world, but one of the most reliably entertaining.”

— Rob Sheffield

89. “The first season of ‘Community’ stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline.”

— Rob Sheffield

90. “God bless Mother Nature, she’s a single woman, too.”

— Rob Sheffield

91. “You have blundered into an adult existence you don’t understand, and you can’t tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it’s too late either way.”

— Rob Sheffield

92. “When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.”

— Rob Sheffield

93. “I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t have a noun.”

— Rob Sheffield

94. “Most of an award-show host’s job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it’s the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel’s ‘Hero Dog Awards.’”

— Rob Sheffield

95. “On ‘Idol,’ Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.”

— Rob Sheffield

96. “Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it.”

— Rob Sheffield

97. “The bassist – always the bassist.”

— Rob Sheffield

98. “At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure – after ‘Bad Girls,’ nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with ‘Off The Wall.’”

— Rob Sheffield

99. “The Word ‘Repulse’: I hate this word. I believe ‘repel’ is a perfectly good word, and ‘repulsion’ is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says ‘compulse’ or ‘impulse’ as a verb. So why would you ever say ‘repulse’? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I’m right.”

— Rob Sheffield

100. “As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.”

— Rob Sheffield