Love Quote by Johnny Thunders

Johnny Thunders is selling a kind of punk extremism that doubles as self-protection: if the room is split between devotion and disgust, you never have to sit with the more complicated verdict of indifference. “Nobody in between” isn’t just swagger, it’s an insurance policy against the humiliating middle category of being merely tolerated. For an artist whose myth was as loud as his guitar, neutrality would be the real failure.

The line also understands celebrity as an emotional economy. Love and hate are both high-engagement currencies; they keep the story moving, keep the audience arguing, keep your name circulating. The “prefer” is the tell. He’s framing polarization as a choice, not a consequence, flipping what might be read as social rejection into personal branding. It’s a classic move for someone who came up in scenes where taste functioned like a bouncer: you were either inside the tribe or a poseur.

Context matters: Thunders, tied to the New York Dolls and the Heartbreakers, helped define a moment when rock was shedding virtuoso polish for danger, attitude, and friction. The quote echoes that aesthetic. Punk didn’t want to be liked by everyone; it wanted to expose the audience’s need to be pleased. Thunders turns that into a personality thesis: be so specific, so abrasive, so unmistakably yourself that the soft consensus can’t form around you. Beneath the bravado is a bruised insight about attention and survival: if they hate you, at least they’re still looking.