If in addition to being physically unattractive you find that you do not get along well with others, do not under any circumstances attempt to alleviate this situation by developing an interesting personality. An interesting personality, is, in an adult, insufferable. In a teenager it is frequently punishable by law.

I took some voice lessons here and there as a teenager but nothing too serious. I started taking it more seriously when I was in Miss Saigon. I needed to improve my technique in order to survive doing that show as many time a week as I was doing it. It's not an easy show to sing, so I needed all the help I could get.

When I was a teenager, my father went bust. He could have declared himself bankrupt, but he was an honourable man and he insisted on paying back all his debts. That almost ruined the family. I was aware that my mother and father couldn't control things anymore. I guess I was afraid that we would end up on the street.

I was absolutely floored as a lot of people are but also I was reunited with ideas that I actually had as a teenager and these are ideas that I had put away as I approached college years because they were ridiculous on the face of it and when you talk to someone about living forever, they just dismiss you out of hand.

I have really long hair, so I don't cut it all that often. Sometimes, when I'm working, I just have the stylist on set trim it for me. I don't dye my hair. When I was a teenager, I dyed my hair five colors at one time. It was all different shades of red going from more orange to more purple. I thought I looked so cool.

X-Men is not a story about superheroes, but a story about the ongoing revolutionary struggle between good/new and bad/old. The X-Men are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there.

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

An album for me as a teenager in the '70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record.

I am not sure that there has been a "lack of progress." On the contrary, the concept of feminism is not only well established but is now also attracting interest from young women, including teenagers and pre-teens. But a new interest is also symptomatic of the failure of the feminist project and the need for its renewal.

I was fortunate because my mum shared my love of film with me, so we would go to the movies twice, three times a week, and we would watch movies at home. As a teenager, instead of going out, we would have these huge movie nights in. But I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre.

I was 16 when my father died, and I had a choice to come back and live in his house or I'd stay at the school. But I felt if my father wanted me to go to that school when I was 5, there must have been a reason - and I understood that reason when I was a teenager, because that school became the only place where I was safe.

It seems to be this hot-bed for these ideas and bringing these groups together. You find that the one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're a teenager who has run away from his parents, or a divorcee who lost her husband, is that they all have in common this feeling of searching for a meaning in their lives.

She was this incredible mom. With each of her kids, she did something called `time,' where she would spend an hour each day doing whatever the kid wanted to do, whether it was play spacemen or `Let's go into your makeup, and I'll make you up like a clown.' And as a teenager you'd be like, `Rub me, Mom. Give me a massage.'

I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.

I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don't the adult around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did.

I think you are going through so many 'firsts' as a teenager, and it's a charged time because of that. You don't have much autonomy in life. Everything is just kind of crazy, and there are so many huge decisions to be made, like where are you going to college or who you date. These things can really affect your whole life.

I think with '10 Things I Hate About You,' I was an angsty teenager, and in some ways, I responded to that character. That was one of my first big jobs, so I think maybe I lucked out, and casting thought that I was a good match for it. Since then, as I've gotten older, I'm a much more happy, joyful, almost carefree person.

I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn't think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn. Like most teenagers, I was far too self-centered. When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others’ opinions of me, I became more confident and free.

The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.

How many films are there about friendships between teenagers? And how many projects are there dealing with friendships among adults? True friendships - really dealing with the intimacy behind what happened then, and how long you've known each other, and the wounds that haven't healed. That's what [About Alex] film is about.

My memories are of denim. I remember being 12 in my Levi's. Wow! As a teenager in Milan, I was really fascinated by Fiorucci, but at the time I was not rich enough to buy. Oh my God! I made a collection of Fiorucci shopping bags, and my mother, she still has them and my stickers, and now I invite Elio Fiorucci to our shows.

When I was a teenager, I was an umpire for a competitive league for 8- to 9-year-olds. I was really bad at it because I didn't know all the rules, and all these kids were better athletes than me. I made a bad call, and this dad snapped on me. Then he dumped his trash from his cooler, and I had to kick him out of the stands.

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

To anyone else, Xavier's use of the word angel would have sounded like nothing more than a lovesick teenager professing his admiration. Only the two of us knew differently and now we both shared a secret- that brought us closer than ever. It was as if we had just sealed the bond between us, closed the gap, and made it final.

Adults who loved and knew me, on many occasions sat me down and told me that I was black. As you could imagine, this had a profound impact on me and soon became my truth. Every friend I had was black; my girlfriends were black. I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager.

I was in the process of growing dreads, they were down to my lip. I could whip them back and forth. Then I just thought to myself, "Is this really me? Can I really do this?" So I washed them out and went to the barber shop. I told them to give me a mohawk. But then there was this teenager also getting one. I couldn't do that.

The doctor said, 'He can't last a week.' And I did. And they said, 'There's no way this kid's going to last a month.' And I did. And so they said, 'Two years. He's not going to make it.' Two years. 'Five years. He can't do that.' I lived to be five years. 'He's never going to hit double digits.' And here I am, a new teenager.

I've always been a lover of classical music ever since I was an early teenager I suppose. I remember the very first piece of classical music that grabbed me was I bought an LP of Daniel Barenboim performing Mozart's piano concertos and I would have been about 14 or 15 at the time and I remember I played it over and over again.

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

Raising minimum wage doesn't just benefit the workers behind me, it creates a proven ripple effect that increases wages all the way up the scale. ... Let's get the facts straight, only 20 percent of people making the minimum wage are teenagers. The rest are hardworking adults, many of them with families, and I mean hardworking.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

When I was a teenager, in the '80s, it was 'Dynasty.' It was 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And those were fantasies. Those weren't reflective of my experience. And I think we all want that; we all want to see ourselves, our story told, something to relate to, to help us and know that we're not freaks, that our experiences aren't odd.

I don't have kids, but I've often noticed when people first become parents they seem to completely forget their own adolescence and they start to, as their kids become teenagers, try to do the things that didn't stop them themselves. And I jokingly frame this as: Your brain gets wiped of those memories when you become a parent.

I believe that you can experience very profound moments of change in life...I never would have become an actress if I hadn't dropped out of high school. As a teenager, I was so driven to pursue my dreams that I made a decision to quit school at 17 so I could find my voice as an actress and eventually the profession embraced me.

Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

When I was a teenager in a band playing, everything was great. I still don't feel any different. I still wake up with the same love and passion as when I did this with the band. Because my life in music has let me live the kind of life that I've loved, and I've been able to share it with others and take care of the people I love.

After school, I went to Damascus to study law and history, which I didn't really like. I didn't like history, in particular. In Syria, the regime was trying to present to us a distorted version of the past. Assad was shown as the father of history. So I decided to shift to film, which was something I had always loved as a teenager.

Before I got famous, I was like a rake. When I was a teenager, I lived on nervous energy. And I always forgot to eat. It was not something I was obsessed with. And then suddenly I got famous, people started taking me out to fancy joints. And the pounds pile on. So I'm much more conscious now about when I eat. How I eat. What I eat.

As you might imagine, if you're a teenager having a couple of people with microphones and guns always following you around, that could grate on them. But you know, they've handled it with grace and I give Michelle [Obama] most of the credit for how well they've done, but I also just think they are graceful, good young, young women.

As a late teenager, the punk movement pushed me further. In particular, the Clash, which happened to leak through the time of disco, showed me that there was this cross-cultural sound that could cut across genres and audiences. Like punk was to disco, rap music was a rebellion against R&B, which had adopted disco and made it worse.

I've never been the sort of person who takes things for granted, and I'm not an acquisitions girl. So I didn't feel entitled to a car when I was 16. Of course, I was bummed I didn't get one, because I was an American Texas teenager! But I understood it. I've never gotten my self-esteem from having the newest, most spectacular thing.

Magnus, standing by the door, snapped his fingers impatiently. "Move it along, teenagers. The only person who gets to canoodle in my bedroom is my magnificent self." "Canoodle?" repeated Clary, never having heard the word before. "Magnificent?" repeated Jace, who was just being nasty. Magnus growled. The growl sounded like "Get out.

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

Movies make teenagers have quippy answers for every question. Nothing seems to faze them, and they're like, 'Oh, whatever.' You're not like that when you're a teenager. You're really earnest. Things really feel like life or death. And you kind of oscillate between emotions at one time. It's very emotionally draining being a teenager.

If you say, 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it,' well, then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

Having grown up in the theater family, having done a huge amount of acting from a very little boy to precocious teenager in Shakespeare festivals that my father produced, I went off to college and fell in with the theater gang. I was already an experienced actor. I became a kind of campus star. I heard all this applause and laughter.

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