Knoxville Quotes

(on the first time he heard Hank Garland) I was in Knoxville, and I heard this chorus. I don`t recall the artist now, but I remember then that I thought it was the greatest guitar chorus I`d ever heard, so I checked around and found out it was Hank Garland who played it.

I`ve always had itching feet. I like being on the move every couple of years. (Knoxville News-Sentinel, Sept 24, 2004)

(Interviewer reports Monaghan sneaking away briefly from an ABC party and lighting up a cigarette, to talk of his recent past:) "It`s hard to imagine that this was happening to someone who was in one of the biggest movies of the year before. But I would not give up that time for anything in the world. I remember writing in my journal that I was going through this growing experience because of it. I came back down to Earth with a bump." (Knoxville News-Sentinel, Sept 24, 2004)

(on being intrigued by the part of the tortured Charlie in the TV series "Lost" (2004):) "The frustration of Charlie`s situation means he has a lot going on in his head. He lives in his head quite a lot. He`s a drug addict, and drug addicts, by nature, are a selfish lot. It`s a little like life imitating art. I`m not there now, but I can remember what it was like, being a little bit out there on a limb. He had it all, and now he`s facing all this (stuff). (Dom`s word was probably "shit.") Knoxville News-Sentinel, Sept 24, 2004

(on the period after shooting The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003):) "My first year in Los Angeles was pretty hellish. I came over here after the high point of `Lord of the Rings,` and I saw all my friends jumping around to jobs, and I had nothing." ... "My manager at the time was not doing anything for me, and I kind of got into a little bit of a funk. I was living in a (lousy) house in a (bad) part of town. I didn`t have a car, and living in L.A. without a car, well, is difficult. I couldn`t get a car because I didn`t have an American bank account and could not get credit. It`s harder to get credit than what you might think. So at that point, I was just hanging out at my place all day, playing `Grand Theft Auto III.` I was waiting for the phone I didn`t have to ring." (Knoxville News- Sentinel, Sept 24, 2004)

I interviewed Johnny Knoxville once. I was kind of scared to interview him because I thought he might be a real jerk, but he was really nice, and I ripped his chest hair out.

Pink Flamingos - I don`t think it`s my best movie, but God knows the day I die it will be in the first paragraph of my obituary. It helped make trash more respectable. It lasted longer than I ever would have imagined. I still meet young kids who have just seen it and they react with the same disbelief that people did the first time. I`m proud of it. It was made to make fun of censorship laws at the time. All that has kind of faded. If I hadn`t done the scene where Divine ate dog shit, Johnny Knoxville would have done it in Jackass. The Jackass movies are the closest in spirit to Pink Flamingos than anything else.

I wanted this movie to feel as much as possible like a cousin of Smokey and the Bandit, and Burt Reynolds had that sort of rakish good looks. He did his own stunts, he considered himself sort of a ladies` man. I feel like Knoxville has a number of those qualities. He`s done so much really funny stuff, he`s Southern, he`s got a certain toughness to him.

Our team respects Texas. They have beaten us four in a row and beat us by 10 last year in Knoxville. We were not surprised.

We could go anywhere we needed to go. I grew up in Knoxville on the half-miles and Sioux Falls on the quarter-miles and I love these quarter-miles as well as the half-miles, but when you`ve got a car working like this it`s like, `Holy cow it`s fun to race.`