Quotes About Youth

I didn't agree with everything she was trying to get me to do and teach me, but once I got old enough, I understood everything. I'm thinking she was being mean. I'm like, 'Damn, I just want to have fun. I just want to go outside, Grandma, play with the rest of the kids and kick it and ride bikes.' She prepared me for life with all of the rules.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

I understood it was a poor area when I was young because you're driving through it and you see these low-income homes that I hadn't really seen before. I'd lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods before we moved to Athens and The Plains. You understand, but you don't really understand the magnitude until you get older.

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

These kids understood what is not immediately obvious; that they were going to pay the bills for tax cuts that had been passed today or in the last 4 years, and for the war in Iraq, because essentially we are borrowing money to do those things.

When I was growing up, we used to play basketball in a park that was never shoveled when it snowed. The basketball rims were never fixed. And we understood then that there was a relationship between public policy and our quality of life.

If my parents really understood how much I've learned that I could never learn in school, they'd be very proud. Instead, I'm still their crazy kid, sagging his pants and dancing around on the laptop.

I was a big fan of Bret Hart growing up, and Shawn Michaels, the Undertaker, Triple H. I've probably drawn from them when I was younger.

When I was ten years old, I had great pride in myself, which sometimes even took the form of boasting and self-praise; although I myself did not want to, I used to assume the air of someone undertaking some great work and mighty act of heroism.

I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.

When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everything is different.

Andrew Keenan-Bolger was my college roommate for two years. Instead of going to tap class, we'd be in our underwear eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos on our futon watching Paula Deen for hours.

If you're trying to get to the underworld of Berlin, it's not suits and ties; it's rock and roll.

Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

There's definitely a lot of undiscovered talent in Africa. If I'm one of them and there's a few other guys in the league, that means that there must be some that are hidden.

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

Obama set a record number of deportations of illegal immigrants in 2011, but that fact alone is misleading. Obama has spoken in favor of and has urged Congress to pass the DREAM Act, a bill that would allow young undocumented immigrants to stay in America, their home, and achieve citizenship by going to college or serving in the military.

As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.

It seemed like my professional life would take a more scientific route. I guess that plan started to become undone when, at the age of 17, I happened upon a screening of Alain Resnais' 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' and it took my breath away.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

I don't think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.

I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.

I was dyslexic and uneducated and left school at 14. I grew up in Finsbury Park, which was a pretty bad place where you had to fight and be beaten. It was just a constant roundabout of violence.