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.
