Quotes About Nostalgia

Nobody uses skits at all anymore, so it seems like I use a lot. That's how I grew up on tapes. Biggie tapes, Biggie albums would have skits. The Lox would have skits. Mase would have skits. All the dudes I grew up on in Nineties rap would have skits on their projects, just to make you feel like you were right there with them.

I remember an old Singer sewing machine at home that belonged to my grandmother. It had a pedal. My mom taught me how to use it when I was 12 years old. I used to find it so intriguing, how a flat piece of material could be made into an object that had so many uses.

I love songs but am inhibited to have my characters burst out to express themselves through songs. I use the route of using old songs at the right places.

There's a fun, nostalgic aspect to Legos - people connect to the art on a different level. But it's also a medium that lets me design anything I can imagine. I especially enjoy creating curvy forms using rectangular pieces. Up close, you notice the sharp angles, but when you back away, the corners blend into curves.

The gaming world is a complete mystery to me! Well, I did play Pac Man and Frogger using big machines at an arcade back in the '80s.

As a kid, when I was living in America, I started using those Noxzema wipes that just felt like you removed half your face. I quite like that tingly sensation.

Riding a horse and using a phone camera is tricky but if you don't take pictures or record the moment, you lose it. You want to have a record of it.

In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations - foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint.

When I saw Bryan Singer's 'Usual Suspects,' I knew how it was going to end because I'd seen 'Scary Movie.' Which is not the preferred order of things, but that's how it is because my childhood was 'Home Alone,' 'Matilda,' 'Batman Returns,' 'Jumanji,' 'Secret Garden,' 'Jack,' 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' 'Titanic.' Only family films from the '90s.

I still love Utah. I miss being out there, but sometimes you have to move on and try new things.

Of course a trade with Utah would make me happy. I grew up there.

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

I always liked movies like 'American Graffiti' and 'Gregory's Girl.' 'Gregory's Girl' is particularly perfect because it really captures that summer holiday bubble of teenage utopia. Even though it's got a happy ending, there's a feeling that these characters may never see each other again.

In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.

I remember spending one summer being utterly obsessed with trying to get the legendary unreachable 'Ice Key' from 'Banjo-Kazooie.'

My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.

For the naysayers that claimed 'American Family' revealed us to be vacant, unloving, uncaring morons of the materialistic '70s, this image will be proven wrong when Mom and Dad remarry... Make no mistake. This is not to emphasize the sadness of my demise but rather emphasize the love of my family and friends.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

When I was a boy, I had a baseball team of my own. We played on a vacant lot between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets. I had a little menagerie of my own, some pigeons, guinea pigs, and so on. On Saturday mornings, I had to take my music lesson. Then the members of my team used to come see my menagerie.

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour's drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well.

Before the 'Fast & Furious' promo in Manila, I went on a vacation in the Philippines 10 years earlier. I loved it. My 'Miss Saigon' friends showed me around.

Remember when vacation photos meant toting along a bulky camera?

New York reminds me a little bit of Canada and my upbringing. Los Angeles is like living in a vacation, and you have to pinch yourself every once and a while.