How I view my body hasn't been uncomplicated, but that was because my body was discussed and dissected at great length in a very public forum, when I was at a formative age.

When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.

Everything I do will always be compared to 'Love Song' in terms of success or the way it's written or whatever, but it was a really formative moment in my life and in my career.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

Who'd have thought that living life like a dime store floozy throughout your formative years could negatively affect your decision-making ability or long-term, future relationships?

My first pilot gig, in fact my first job in television, was 'Freaks and Geeks,' and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.

Middle school students are at a critical time in their lives when making good choices matters - the decisions they make in these formative years have an impact on their future success.

My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape.

When I was in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, Green Day was my formative entry to punk. I wish I could say I was listening to Minor Threat and Black Flag, but I wasn't. Bay Area punk bands were doing it right.

It was strange, especially because all of the projects I did when I was young, I was always the youngest on set or the only child, so I spent my formative years hanging out with 24-year-olds when I was 13.

If you look at why people become wack as they get older, it's because they stop doing the things they did that were formative to their work. You can't mentally stay still. You can't not challenge yourself.

While my father was a diplomat rather than a business person, I count him as a critically important formative role model. He was comfortable living and working all around the world, wherever he was assigned.

I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.

My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical 'we're in this together' sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.

When I was in my formative years, I rejected Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Dean Martin. I now realise they were all great artists, but at the time, as a young man, you have to clear the decks.

I wasn't prepared for the environment I encountered trying to break into television news. In the world of music, where I spent my formative years, we were judged solely on our talent, and gender wasn't a factor.

When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch - they were formative for me. I also read 'Flash Gordon' when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I'd have been an imbecile.

During our formative years, it was all about, 'What did Metallica do?' and 'How do we do that?' and then you try and find an identity of your own, but they're still... They were the pioneers and the trailblazers.

In my formative years, when I was a little kid, I'd get out of elementary school, and because my mother worked as a nurse, I'd have to find a way to get a ride to the high school and watch my dad's team practice.

Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.

The combination of Federalism and Republicanism which formed the substance of the system, did not constitute a progressive and formative political principle, but it pointed in the direction of a constructive formula.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women.

I'd never been one for leaving the comforts of home. That person wasn't me; I didn't spend my formative years youth-hostelling round Rwanda or climbing Everest in a tie-dye playsuit to raise awareness of something or other.

It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women's approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.

I think if I'd been born ten years earlier when Ma was at the height of 'Avengers' fame, it would have been a different kettle of fish altogether, but she was very much a ma first and an actress second for my formative years.

My formative years would be in South Central Los Angeles. It was a really volatile environment, but, I always say, when you're living in the hood, you don't live this life where you're crying every day, downtrodden every day.

I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.

I have very fond memories of the '80s; they were very formative years for me. I certainly remember the Cold War. It was a closer doorstep for the Brits than the Americans, so it was a very real and palpable threat at the time.

When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.

If you got in my truck, you were listening to country music, and that's the way it was for a long time. I'm a little more open to other sources of music now, a lot more. But for the formative years, I was just very into country.

It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness.

High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

I spent three years at RMIT doing a bachelor of arts and media studies. It was a hugely formative experience. As someone who had a private Catholic school upbringing, the world suddenly became a much bigger and better place for me.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

Going to college was a very necessary step in order to have my formative years, which for everybody kind of happens in their teens, but for gay men that don't necessarily come out until later in life, it kind of happens a little later.

I'm very comfortable in Argentina. I was raised there as a baby and stayed there until I was 11 years old, so the first decade of my life or my formative years were spent in Argentina. I stayed in tune with the food, music and language.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

Rooming with six strangers and having my life taped for MTV's groundbreaking reality series, 'The Real World', in the nation's most liberal city was a formative experience for a young, Hispanic, conservative, Catholic girl from the Southwest.

I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.

If women's choices - such as taking time off to rear children - make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys' behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?

Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

I wouldn't be where I am, if not for Jamaica. My formative years were here. I wouldn't have the confidence that I have if I wasn't born here, because growing up here I knew I could become anybody I wanted to become. There was no ceiling on top of me.

My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.

I have a big brother who would make dolls' houses and playhouses and furniture out of wood. He was the one who taught me from such a young age that you could just make something. The physical act of gluing something together was really formative for me.

I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

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