Top 205 My Generation Quotes

There’s a kind of immediacy that comes with being constantly connected that I don’t really relate to in my generation.

But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I’m very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.

American women mean a great deal to me. They’re such lost souls, particularly the women of my generation. And women need so much help. They never have anyone to turn to. I help them understand how they can look better, how to do this, do that, get a job. And they’re very trusting. Like little lost kids.

The problem is that my generation was pacified into believing that racism existed only in our history books.

My generation has to deal with how to overcome a trauma, how to overcome destruction, and how to tell the truth to the next generation.

Growing up, ‘Mean’ Gene was the voice of my generation.

My generation are the neurotic ones. Therapists’ offices all over the world are full of patients blaming their parents for their own failings.

I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can’t do it. They don’t have the chops.

In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island, which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ Of course, that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation.

A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare, for my Mom’s generation, for my generation, and for my kids and yours.

I have a daughter. I have my imagination. I have friends. I, in no way, am going to louse that up with some idiot man, frankly. They drag you down – I’m talking about my generation of men.

Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.

I was raised in a time where children were still seen and not heard basically, so I think a lot of us in my generation went the other way and just tried to be as much more liberal and open and we’re still paying for it.

I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.

I think Afghanistan has turned into the Vietnam of my generation, only with a better homecoming.

I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn’t do only tennis.

R&B was really prominent in the ’90s, and we can all admit that it kind of fell off. But my generation is more in touch with our emotions – we’re not afraid to show them. We’re bringing that decade back.

My job as a mayor is to look 10, 15, 20 years into the future and think not just about my generation, but about my children’s generation and my unborn grandchildren and think – what is the kind of economy that they’re going to to inherit and what are we doing today to prepare ourselves for that?

So many people of my generation who served in the government were prisoners of the Cold War culture, still are.

There are hundreds of stories I’ve heard from black women from my generation, generations before me, and the next, that have never been given an opportunity to fulfill their dreams.

My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the baby boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us.

I feel like I’m the voice for my generation, especially for women.

People in the Middle East may consider the U.S. an evil hegemony that has tainted their culture, but when I look at the growth of racial and ethnic tolerance and understanding in my generation in the U.S., and see those sentiments make it around the world, it makes me feel proud.

My last series was on A.B.C., a one-hour called ‘My Generation’. Critics liked it. I was on for two weeks, and that was a tough one.

Is there someone who can play guitar better than me technically? One hundred percent. But does anyone look better playing a guitar in my generation? Absolutely not.

Hong Kong movies were really popular in my generation.

I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old – and I know that we are ready.

I think it’s best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, ‘Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.’

From being a teacher and educator, I see the state of the music through the eyes of an 18-year-old coming on to the scene, and we want to make sure it stays intact. With my generation, it’s our duty to do that.

Growing up, my generation would practise on concrete in the backstreets, using garage doors or the health-centre walls as goals. Taking on the older boys in the neighbourhood taught me to be humble, too.

I was no different to any other kid of my generation. I played with my mates in the park every day, every spare minute I could.

I know my generation – a lot of them, they’re getting old now, and they want to think back fondly, they want to kid themselves. A lot of them think, ‘Yeah, we were the best.’ That’s the kiss of death. That’s non-growth. And also that’s very bad for the world.

I was such a ‘Star Wars’ fan. That was my generation.

I wish I could be on ‘Politically Incorrect.’ Because Bill Maher basically dismisses teenagers, and I think I could give my generation a good name.

My generation of playwrights have grown up writing for studio theatres, and so the task of writing for more than ten or so actors is a huge challenge. Logistically, it’s like doing an enormous Sudoku. Making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time in the right order instantly sends me into a cold sweat.

My generation, we really have to step up to the plate and vote. Tweeting is great – people say, ‘Oh, I don’t want this or that’ – but at the end of the day, tweeting isn’t a ballot. Just saying that you don’t like someone on Twitter is not going to turn a state blue or red. You have to vote.

It’s hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

I’m probably the most successful Celtic bard of my generation, who projected this style and this image and this casketful of magical songs all around the world.

People of my generation did not like very much to tell what we lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime.

A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

Among my generation, there was a purist position that any contact with electoral politics was an unforgiveable compromise.

Women of my generation who’ve stayed in science have done it by playing the men at their own game.

My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.

I wanted to make some of the really important things of my generation and some of the biggest.

I love dancing in general and making girls dance. My generation doesn’t do it enough.

I wear jeans and a T-shirt sometimes. I just like clothes – since the first time I can remember, like age ten or eleven; I was just obsessed with music and clothes. Just like a lot of people in England from my generation.

Men from my generation are chauvinist pigs!

I would only create clothes myself if I felt I could do something really different – create a new style subculture for my generation – and that is very ambitious.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

I took a job as a reporter in India, where I lived with several married couples, which got me interested in why some marriages work and others fail. Back home, many women of my generation were also putting off marriage or not getting married at all, which only led me to more questions.

My generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s.

My generation of black British people often feels part American because of what we learned from TV.

My generation was the tail end of the Cold War.

I want to become successful and represent a different form of beauty in my generation.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

My generation, we’re so smart and opinionated, and we know the world we want to live in; we know the future we want. We’re such a liberal, forward-thinking generation that’s been held back by an older generation that doesn’t understand it, doesn’t want the world to progress quickly because of old ideologies.

For children of my generation, anime was an escape from Japan’s loser complex following World War II. Anime wasn’t foreign. It was our own.

I think people of my generation became journalists – you know, right after the broadcast pioneer fathers – because we wanted to report the big stories.

My generation spends too much time in the mirror and not enough looking inside ourselves.

Fresh out of grad school, I arrived for my first day of work at Deloitte ready for the long haul. For my generation, that’s what those early years were about – laying the foundation for a lifelong career with a great organization. More than 30 years later, I’m still with Deloitte, and I have no regrets.

The difference between my generation of actors and their generation is that they were bigger than life. We are not bigger than life.

Let me acknowledge that I realize that, in honoring me, the Committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences is in fact saying a good word for all of those of my generation who have been laboring in the same vineyard.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren’t created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

I’ve got weird conflicting feelings about my generation.

Part of making a relationship work is compromise and I think the idea of compromise in relationships is something that we lack in my generation.

I don’t want to name any names, but I’ve worked on television shows where there’s a guy writing for my generation who’s, like, 60 – and it doesn’t work.

I can honestly say that throughout the 70s I never watched telly. I can remember ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Morecambe and Wise’ vaguely, but my generation didn’t watch telly.

A lot of people in my generation, we use hip-hop as a tool to compose.

I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.

We weren’t selling anything. We were just having a good time. And that feeling – there are people who say, ‘I wish my kids, I wish my generation, had a chance to see it.’

I think in my generation, when I came along in the early ’60s, the type of music that was in vogue in society in those days had moved on to another kind of music. I was trying to sell antiques in a modern appliance store.

I think ‘Horace Silver’ was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of ‘Horace Silver.’

I started out, as most astronomers do, with a university job. But in my generation, women weren’t very welcome at universities, and so I found a job in the government. And the government was appreciably more welcoming.

So many people’s parents separate and for my generation it is very normal. But I remember feeling as though nobody ever spoke about it.

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they’re just like us… And when you see that they’re just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

The Gen X generation never got past ‘Reality Bites,’ apparently, and my generation, the Gen Yers… Facebook? Maybe a conservative revolution?

In my generation, thankfully, as somebody who served in the Afghanistan War, would have served in the Iraq War, if called to do so – was also strongly against the Iraq War, from the beginning – I’m so thankful that we live in a moment that we can honor the troops separately from policy.

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the ’50s were immigrant values even though we weren’t immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

All the foreign movies we saw about love affected me and my generation. Now we no longer want to die for the regime, we want to die for love.

I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.

Like so many of my generation and those younger, I have spent most of my life in the E.U., and my instincts were naturally for reform from within.

I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.

A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they’ve seen before.

My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn’t expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing – which is interesting but uncomfortable.

Boys from my generation all love Jim Carrey! But you know, just being in his house with him and pitching jokes that he would act out, literally felt like the dreams that I had, so it was amazing.

When I was in high school, in my generation, I thought that you got a logical, sensible job, or you got married.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

Literally, my earliest memory, my earliest vivid memory, is the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Yeah, I was in fourth grade, and I was just so captivated. And I think you’ll find a lot of space scientists of my generation will say the same thing. Apollo was a big event for them.

Hey, I’m just trying to become the Michael Caine/Gene Hackman of my generation.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

My generation is so intelligent.

I was taught you don’t tell your secrets to strangers – certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

I know what it’s like to be faced with student loans, to have rent so high you don’t know if you’re ever going to be able to save up and buy a home. The issues the people of my generation are going through are natural for me because I’ve lived them, my friends are living them.

Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.

I think singing traditional country is wonderful, because I’m bringing it to my generation and to the younger kids.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

So what are we given? We’re also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents.

I always laugh about it because when I come in with hair extensions or lashes or all this makeup, she’s like, ‘Take it off, mommy, you’re beautiful just the way you are.’ It’s amazing to think that a 6-year-old can have what so many women of my generation are struggling to figure out.

My generation remembered going to the movies as an event. We would see these things, we would bring them home, and we would think about them for years because it would take a long time before they would go on television where you could re-experience the fun that you had when you watched them.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

A lot of people in my generation have dared to ask questions like, ‘Who is James Dean?’ And I can’t imagine asking a question like that, just because it’s been ingrained in me since I was so young.

I’ve always found, when I was younger, that the older guys – the guys who weren’t of my generation but were 20, 30 years older than me – were the cool guys.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

My generation knows the cost of short-sightedness in Iraq.

It’s easy to look at kids sitting around a campfire looking at their phones and to think, ‘What a shame.’ But I think they’re going to be more advanced in terms of communication than my generation.

My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation’s shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws.

For my generation of actors, it was about the theatre. Television didn’t exist. Coaxial cable didn’t exist.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father’s generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, ‘The Frugal Gourmet,’ made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.

There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don’t think my generation wants that. That’s how it used to be.

Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.

Like many people of my generation, I feel like I survived my adolescent mischief only by a miracle, and it seems too much to hope for that the same miracle would befall my children – therefore, I want to make sure they take fewer chances than I did.

I wanted to build a tool for my generation: people 20 to 40 who don’t want to spend time balancing a checkbook or checking multiple financial institutions’ websites. Mint does just that, giving comprehensive, quick insights into a user’s finances from their computer, mobile phone and/or tablet.

My generation was advised to focus on one area to excel.

We’re so used to getting everything we want now, my generation.

I feel incredibly blessed that I’m in my generation and not my mother’s generation. I feel that I’m very much benefitting from the strides that the women before me made.

My generation put in a lot more hours playing football after school than kids today. These days, all the football these kids play, they play at their clubs, so the clubs need to work seriously on the basic skills.

You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.

The difference between me and other people in my generation is instead of saying the Internet’s killing the record business, I say, ‘Who cares about the record business, the Internet is enhancing music.’

Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don’t wanna move out. They don’t want to and they don’t have the means to sustain it. That’s where my heart is and that’s what I think about all the time.

I think with my generation, your first game of senior football was often a Sunday League game of football. Sometimes you’re playing on pitches that aren’t great, you’ve no referee, you’ve no goal nets.

I want to be the greatest investigative reporter of my generation.

I feel connected to my generation through the music, but I also fear for us. We’re in a very self-destructive state where we’re addicted to outside opinions and we all feel like we have fans.

I feel like it’s a real shame that my generation doesn’t make an appearance at the opera.

I was an original Elvis fan. He was the voice of my generation. I was listening to him on the radio when he released his great Sun records with Scotty Moore on electric guitar and Bill Black on bass.

My generation feels it has been lied to a great deal.

Can I just tell you, I think it’s the most beautiful thing about young people today, it gives me so much hope for the future, that they don’t really recognize race the way my generation does.

I’m going to become the best-remembered artist of my generation by staying away from the party as often as possible. That way, people will remember me, not because I was great, but because I didn’t cause them any later embarrassment.

Everybody aspires to an affordable home, a secure job, better living standards, reliable healthcare and a decent pension. My generation took those things for granted, and so should future generations.

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I’m just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

But here’s what I would tell people of my generation. I turn 40 this year. There isn’t going to be a Social Security. There isn’t going to be a Medicare when you retire. Forget about what your benefit is going to look like. There isn’t going to be one if we don’t make some reforms to save that program now.

In my generation, there was no sushi school, no cooking school, so people have to learn from working.

I want to say I hate my generation, but I don’t.

My generation was born to work with social media – it’s a natural part of our communication with the world.

Public service is a core value for people of my generation.

I made physical objects because I know how to do something on the computer. That struck a chord with me: Most women of my generation have grown up with technology but lack the handmade creative skills of former generations. This is a big opportunity to fill that gap.

If you grew up in my generation, you’re going to be influenced by Run DMC, the Beastie Boys and also listen to Metallica – it wasn’t segregated anymore.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

I think, my generation, it’s hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.

I think our generation, my generation at least, has become much more comfortable with unconventional romantic relationships.

I just don’t want to live in the past. I’m really disappointed by so many people of my generation who – in order to promote their new work, they have to constantly lean on their past. I don’t want to be that type of artist… I see a lot of people out here doing really marginal music.

I’m sorry, but in my generation and where I came from, only sailors got tattoos. Not ladies.

I cannot believe that my generation may very well have been the last one to have sex education in schools that was truly the complete and total package. I mean what are we doing? Are we in the future, but acting like it’s The Dark Ages?

I could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there’s a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

Of course I always knew ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ and all those. But my real introduction to Queen the band and knowing who they were was the movie ‘Wayne’s World’ like a lot of people in my generation.

If I could work with Eddie Murphy on ‘SNL,’ I think I could quit comedy forever. For me and my generation, he’s God.

I’ve had a prolonged adolescence, like a lot of my generation.

I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

I was on ‘Melrose’ at a time where we had to all go home and be there at the same time when the show was on, or set your VCR. But that was a big thing, and people of my generation still talk about that. They remember where they were, at what point of their lives that show came, and then talking about it the next day.

I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.

I think my generation is defining themselves as Canadian artists.

I grew up with video games. My generation kind of grew up with the Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. Then, I had a Dreamcast and, finally, the PlayStation. So yeah, I’ve always been a big gamer.

My generation has a hard time being genuine and enthusiastic. There’s a lot of irony in our culture.

I didn’t have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn’t understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

My generation of women was the last for whom marriage and a family were the goal.

I think my generation is extremely cynical about love.

My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn’t get passed on to my generation.

Married people from my generation are like an endangered species!

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public.

So many people of my generation all grew up with that shock theater package on television of ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘Wolfman,’ ‘Dracula,’ ‘Mummy,’ all the Universal stuff.

It’s difficult, the synergy between Drake and our generation – my generation, anyway – in the sense that his music is vulnerable, he’s very open, and you can connect to it. Like ‘Started From The Bottom,’ for instance. Not many people would have thought about that, even though it is a simple song.

To people of my generation, the picture show was really another dimension – sensual, whimsical. No uniforms or collective rites, but a place where little boys like me could laugh and feel free.

I think a lot of us are a lot more cautious with marriage because of what we saw happening with our parents. I see a lot more healthy marriages in my generation than they probably saw in theirs.

I’ve had an affinity for Michael Jordan. He’s probably the greatest athlete in my generation.

We are working to understand the tastes of people born in the 1980s and 1990s – it is very different from my generation. We do our own research. Marketing research companies, I think, are relatively academic.

When the Walkman was the craze in my generation, I was one of the first to have it.

Women of my generation aren’t becoming more conservative as we get older. On the contrary, we’re less concerned about what people think.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

I called all adults by their first names, and my mum was just another adult. I was the firstborn of my generation in the family, but because I was so close to my parents in age, they treated me with a kind of adult respect. They talked to me as an equal.

A lot of my chosen family is black and I say that unabashedly. For anyone who doesn’t understand that, they just don’t understand me and my generation because especially in the LGBT community, the concept of chosen family is so important and it’s a survival tactic.

My generation is under-entertained.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown – watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?

I’d love to be the political voice of my generation, but that’s not my gift.

Once I started to retire, I was telling all of the girls in my generation, ‘Wow I feel like an outsider in this locker room because this whole new generation of women has stepped in,’ and that was one of the signs where I said maybe it’s time to retire.

My generation was a special generation. I was born in 1960 and in my childhood we were all big manga consumers that was the culture. We were brought up in manga. Manga evolved around what was being made to cater to kids. All children at that time read ridiculously thick manga books every week.

I’m really excited to share cabaret, the art form, not just with the generations that are above me, but also my generation and the generation under me. I think it’s an art form that’s incredibly important, and I think that my generation is a little unfamiliar with it.

I’d like to be remembered as good person and as one of the best comedians of my generation.

Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.

I definitely take it as a really big responsibility on my shoulders to make sure I’m motivating my generation and the people around me and, hopefully, inspire people to try something new.

I’m in the public eye, so I have a responsibility as an actress to my generation. I think that’s what acting’s all about.

The women’s movement and the result that I get to benefit from and my generation gets to benefit from is that we might be doing housework, but we might not be. And we get to choose, and we get to negotiate and work that out with our prospective husbands or with our husbands.

In my generation, except for a few people who’d gone into banking or nursing or something like that, middle-class women didn’t have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn’t go out and do anything. I found that I got restless.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the ’50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

Social media is a huge struggle for my generation in general – it’s a lot of pressure! Even having an Instagram is stressful. You have to make it look cool, posting it at the right time, and it’s become its own job and not something where you connect with people.

The previous generation paved the way for my generation to gallop unheeded into jobs previously reserved for men.

Like many other people of my generation, I don’t think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn’t ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

I really want to do the unexpected, and I think that’s what I did when I executed ‘Long.Live.A$AP.’ I wanted people to really see the message and that I’m an artist who not only has the capability of rapping, but of composing great music both for people of my generation and for people with different backgrounds.

Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.

I look at other members of my generation who have basically done one thing, and one thing well, and have been handsomely rewarded for it.

I think Bill Finn’s one of the geniuses of theatre, and James Lapine’s one of the diamonds of my generation. The two together are a joy!

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay – before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life – into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.

Girls slightly younger tended to be Donny Osmond girls or Michael Jackson girls, but for my generation, it tended to be David Cassidy.

Certainly in my generation, there aren’t enough actors from a working-class background.

I’ve always considered myself a feminist. But, like a lot of women of my generation, I didn’t think we had to fight for it. I thought it was all done. I took so much for granted.