Top 101 Grown-Up Quotes

It took me a long time to make that leap to being a grown-up and responsible adult because I carried on being a child actor into my late twenties. It’s OK to be precocious when you’re young, but when you’re a man of about 27 or 28 and playing a 17-year-old in a TV show, it kind of prolongs your childhood.

I think clothing is transformative. When you put something really beautiful on, you feel something. In so many ways, we’re always playing a form of dress-up – it’s just a grown-up, much chicer version of it. It’s nice to be able to be whoever you want to be.

I’d like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.

By the time I turned 18, I moved into a little chalet of my own and felt very grown-up.

David Anspaugh, who was my first director, on ‘Rudy,’ was all about empowering the actor, making you feel comfortable and appreciated, allowing you to keep your dignity, and treating you like a man. Being treated like a grown-up makes you proud to be involved in a film.

Being on stage is the best part of my career. I just say whatever comes into my head. It’s the only time I feel grown-up and in control of things.

I’m like the luckiest girl in the world. I’ve gotten to be a princess, I’ve gotten to work with the Muppets. A lot of my childhood dreams about who I wanted to be when I was a grown-up, I at least get to play them in movies.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.

An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or if you’re a grown-up, it doesn’t matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend.

That’s my proudest accomplishment: that I don’t feel like a grown-up.

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work – for those within it and for those it protects.

The first time I went on stage as an adult was touring with the Johnny Cash Show. I’d sang as a child. But my grown-up initiation was as part of that band.

A studio allows you to indulge your untidiness and your penchant for toys and curiosities that really wouldn’t work in a grown-up house.

At 35, I’m definitely starting to feel more like a grown-up than I ever have. There’s nothing in my life that is childish or whimsical. Having fun is fantastic and I never want to lose a sense of that – and also, I think, you have to have that to put into your work or else it’s going to feel stiff.

At any age, we struggle with intimacy. When you’re a kid, you think, ‘I won’t have that problem. I’ll have sex whenever I want when I’m a grown-up!’ And then, somehow, it doesn’t quite turn out that way, and it’s so surprising to people that connection remains so challenging even when you’re married.

We mothers of grown-up daughters tend to view them with a mixture of love, exasperation, irritation and awe.

The first thing I thought when I finished Ernest Cline’s ‘Ready Player One’ was, ‘My God, it’s the grown-up’s ‘Harry Potter.” Now this is from a mega ‘HP’ fan, so I mean business, here.

I felt different at 29 because 29, to me, is 30. There are times when I still feel like an actual toddler in a grown-up – well, semi-grown-up – body.

I wanted to play some more grown-up music – jazz.

When I moved to New York City from Texas at 22, amateur hour was over. As a newly grown-up person, I vowed I would wear dresses and skirts, wool trousers occasionally, and heels always.

It’s very bizarre to me to now really be a grown-up. I kind of can’t believe that I’m there because I certainly don’t feel that way a lot of the time.

Guilt’s too strong a word, but there is this niggling worry that I’m a grown-up doing a childish job and it would be nice to do something more useful and to reach a number of people with an idea you think is important.

It was so strange because I thought Washington was going to be so grown-up, and everyone was going to be so nice. Then people were saying to me, ‘Watch your back in D.C.’ Why? Really? I have to watch my back in D.C?

I’ve never had a couch that needed to be cleaned or learned how to couch-clean in general. That feels too grown-up.

Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.

As a performer you often feel that you’re the child and everyone else is a grown-up.

I’ve always enjoyed gaming, but even as I got older, and I started to get deeper into writing and all this stuff that is my grown-up job, I couldn’t play as much as I used to.

The first skincare product I ever got was nose strips. I was 8 years old, and I was like, ‘I want to feel like a grown-up.’

‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier was the first grown-up book I read, when I was aged about 12.

It’s funny landing parts now where I’m somebody’s mum. I remember the first time I was asked to play a mum. I was easily old enough, but because I didn’t have any children, I thought, ‘That seems really grown-up.’

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn’t figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

When I was growing up, the top movies dealt with grown-up, complex emotions.

We had to think about what the fans and the public would want to see from a grown-up 2PM.

Playing mother to grown-up kids does not allure me much. I will not feel comfortable. Also, my fans will not like me with grey hair.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

I think of the biopics I’ve written as exploring a more grown-up side of myself, through other characters’ lives.

GamerGate-promoted outlets fail at grown-up journalistic ethics, and they also fail at the cheap knockoff brand of GamerGate brand ethics, too.

I don’t think, until you’ve actually lost somebody you really love, that you can go through that door that allows you to be grown-up.

When we were working on ‘Julie & Julia,’ I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven’t made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren’t a grown-up.

When I was growing up I didn’t know what it meant to be a happy, successful grown-up gay person, and now I do. I feel like I’m setting an example for people everywhere.

When I was younger, I used to look at movie stars with pencil-thin noses and think about a nose job. I’ve got a grown-up baby nose; it’s not chiseled and structured. Then I saw how beautiful Audrey Tatou was in ‘Amelie’ and thought, ‘She’s got a nose like mine, and if she can have a baby nose, so can I.’

Even if you can’t afford to travel the world, you can take your children to the museum, zoo or local park. And don’t be afraid to take them to grown-up spots. Eating out in a restaurant teaches children how to be quiet and polite and gives them the pleasure of knowing you trust them to behave.

It always feel like people are doing more grown-up things than you are.

I don’t want anyone as president who promises to take care of me. I may be stupid, but I want a chance to try to be a grown-up and take care of my family.

I’d always thought pop stars had to be really sophisticated and grown-up. So I was enchanted by Bjork’s childlikeness. I’d never heard a voice like hers, with all its character and glottal pronunciations, or music recorded with background noises, like the sound of the city or a bus pulling up.

I’m just lucky because my kids are grown-up – I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don’t need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.

If I’m on the phone, ordering something, people often tell me to have my mother come to the phone. They don’t believe I’m a grown-up.

One summer I was made housekeeper to my own family, making menus and shopping lists. It was my mother’s idea of teaching me to be a grown-up. The main thing I remember is my father being so delighted to get roast duck.

There’s always those few people that are like, ‘Why don’t you play any of the material off your first two records?’ And I’m like, ‘For the same reason that I don’t play with G.I. Joe dolls anymore.’ It’s like, ‘I’m a grown-up.’ I wrote that music when I was a kid.

Being a grown-up woman doesn’t mean you can’t look beautiful, individual and different.

I like to think I’m a grown-up, but it’s just nice you can have a civil conversation with your boss, you’re both on the same page, and you’ve had a text, not about football, just about golf.

I was a grown-up when ‘celebrity’ happened. So I knew exactly what it was like to be in line at a restaurant and watch someone famous walk in and get a table immediately. I knew I didn’t like that; I don’t want to make somebody else feel the way I felt.

The privilege I’ve had over 15 movies over a very long time has been to make movies that were ambitious or grown-up, complex, that had themes in them that were sometimes political, sometimes challenging, to make these movies on a scale.