"

In our darkest hour, in my deepest despair, will you still care? Will you be there? In my trials and tribulations, through our doubts and frustrations, in my violence, in my turbulence, through my fear and my confessions, in my anguish and my pain, through my joy and my sorrow, in the promise of another tomorrow, I'll never let you part, for you're always in my heart."
— Michael Jackson (Dangerous)

"If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.
"
— Michael Jackson - King of Pop

"... songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"So when he asked about getting high, I didn't think, I agreed. We smoked some good California green. Took three tries to put me in the place he said I should be."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn."
— Don DeLillo (Running Dog)

"Beauty is a sign of intelligence."
— Andy Warhol

"Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself."
— Tori Amos

"For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside."
— Jonathan Lethem

"This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical."
— Marcel Danesi (X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture)