Quotes About Youth

When I think of sex symbols, I think of posters my two sisters had on their bedroom walls.

From when I was a really small girl on, I would pick every fabric, every color on the walls, and I was always redecorating. Like once every couple of months I would redecorate my room. I had a full wall that was all collage - the entire wall - when I was in junior high. And then it would kind of morph with me as I was growing.

We would play in this little room in my houseand my parents would bang on the walls: 'Stop playing so loud!'

I never listened to the Grateful Dead as a teen; the only exposure I got was what came through the walls when my sister was listening to them.

Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day - on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room.

One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures.

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.

I grew up having all the Dolce & Gabbana campaigns on the walls of my teenage bedroom, and I was dreaming of one day being a model.

I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.

You know how most kids have posters of sports heroes on their walls? They gave me reams of the old news copy, and I had those taped in my bedroom. And I would practice reading the news.

When we used to walk to school, I used to read off the walls, graffiti and stuff, everything. I used to write stories, but I'd never finish them. I wrote poems.

Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.

We have four million pictures of sports events and add 5,000 a week. If I was 14, I'd have them all over my walls.

Growing up, my generation would practise on concrete in the backstreets, using garage doors or the health-centre walls as goals. Taking on the older boys in the neighbourhood taught me to be humble, too.

When I was a kid I painted the walls in my room like 30 times!

The first time I got locked up, I was in Walmart stealing BB guns.

I know how to waltz because I used to teach ballroom dancing when I was in high school.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

Until I was twelve years old, I led this wandering life, fishing, swimming, and making moccasins.

People don't want to see 17 pieces in neckties. They wanna see some jeans, some gettin' down, and some wigglin'.

To see someone 70 years old with dyed black hair, you're like, 'Hmmm, I dunno. Is that a wrinkled teenager? What is that?' So at some point, I'm going to have to stop doing this. It's gonna look ridiculous. I don't wanna look like Elvis Presley at 60 years old.

What I always wanna tell young people now: Pay attention. This isn't gonna happen again. Rather than try to understand it as it's going along, have it go along for a while and then understand it.

Guys never looked at me. I always had crushes on older seniors who never looked at me. So, when I tell directors that I wanna play that girl who gets rejected, they're like, 'Why?' I tell them it's because I relate to that girl much more than being the girl who makes jaws drop when she walks into a room.