Time & Perspective Quote by John Cale

John Cale’s line lands with the blunt pragmatism of someone who’s watched nostalgia turn from warm glow into a trap. “I like what the future holds” isn’t starry-eyed optimism; it’s a working musician’s stance, the mentality that keeps you making records instead of becoming a museum exhibit of your own legend. Then he snaps the second sentence in half: “I don’t like thinking about the past.” Not “the past is useless,” not “I’ve moved on.” Just don’t like it. That small admission of discomfort is the real tell.

Cale’s career makes the subtext louder. As a Velvet Underground co-founder and an endlessly restive solo artist, he’s been assigned a historical role whether he asked for it or not. The culture loves to freeze artists at their most mythic moment, to treat innovation like a one-time event. Cale pushes back by framing retrospection as an emotional burden, not an intellectual exercise. The past here isn’t “history”; it’s baggage: old narratives, old wounds, old versions of the self that fans and journalists keep trying to resurrect.

The quote also reads like a defense mechanism against the archive-heavy present, where every interview becomes an invitation to re-litigate origin stories. Cale’s intent is clear: don’t ask him to perform his own biography. The future is where agency lives; the past is where other people write your script.