Quotes About Youth

When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

In your mid-twenties, the paint is still wet on who you are.

I actually think the last time I stood with a race medal around my neck was after an eighth grade cross-country meet. I was gawky and 65 pounds soaking wet, and running 10 miles a day was no big deal.

There's something incredibly vulnerable about middle school for me. We're really impressionable during that period. The cement's still wet, so to speak, and a lot of things later in life are born during that season.

When I was 15, I went to see the Stranglers at Bath Pavilion. I saw Jean-Jacques Burnel take off his bass and whack a skinhead over the head with it because he gave a Nazi salute. I thought: 'This is brilliant!'

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

Had I been older, I would've never been able to pull it off because I would've analyzed it to death. When I was 16, there was no such thing as 'what if.'

You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work. What if you paid them in the afternoon to work in the clerical office or as the assistant librarian?

I thought, 'What if I were 17, and it was my small town of Springhill, Louisiana? How would I feel if people started flooding in to see some bird?'

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

I'm 15 and everything I'm doing right now is really exciting to me, so, actually, whatever I'm into at the moment, I'm somehow able to stay very focused on. I just keep moving forward.

Becoming an inspiration for kids is great. I want to inspire them to do whatever they want to.

I was always a tomboy. I always wanted to be around the boys, always wanted to play sports - basketball, football, kickball, whatever it was. I was real aggressive. I wanted to be around the bros!

I think the most exciting thing is that you expect people our age to know the music, but actually a lot of kids know the music, and if anything is left, we have left really good music, and that's the important part, not the mop-tops or whatever.

I was a bit of a late developer, and everyone was saying, 'Whatever you do, don't shave,' and I hadn't really started shaving. I remember rubbing the soot from a kettle on to my bumfluff to make it look more like I had a beard.

There's always a Justin Bieber. Ever since I've been around, there's always been one of him. You know, you can trace it back from how old you are and the boy bands that came along then and the teen sensations and whatnot. And, you know, good for them. There's a few of them that make it out and a few of them that don't.

Maybe that's the whole teen oeuvre, you know covering people in disgusting bodily fluids and whatnot.

I played basketball and baseball up until college, yea. Then I lost my discipline and started chasing girls and whatnot.

I've seen guys who had the craziest amount of talent growing up and let that hype and whatnot and the money go to their head.

I think, as you get older, you reflect at the silliness of your youth and the stupidity of some of the decisions that were made, and the ego and whatnot, or whatever played into it.

I think I was the last teenager to get WhatsApp.

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.

Try scrolling through a regular teenager's Facebook or Instagram posts, everything is captioned with borrowed words or lyrics from songs, without any filters whatsoever and many times without quotation marks, because we all know what the millenials have done with punctuation.

There is no child left within me, none whatsoever.