I can’t pretend to be a teenager, but I feel like I never really stopped being a teenager.
I was an unhappy teenager, and there’s just no way around it.
No one could have been nicer, classier nor better looking than Dick Clark. I’ve had a crush on him since I was a teenager.
With ‘Pariah,’ at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, ‘No, I’m from Nashville.’
The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.
I was a real tomboy for most of my life. Then I went through a really girlie period, then through a goth phase. I was so obsessed with my hair and makeup, and I was having so much fun as a teenager playing with my look.
When I was a teenager, I met a comedian who I admired, and he was very rude to me. That’s why when people come up to me I try not to be rude. I don’t want to name who he is, but it really put me off watching his stuff since.
When I was a teenager, my idol was the Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff. He’s the only person I’ve ever asked for an autograph.
As long as you think of your real self as the person you are, then of course you’re going to be fearful of death. But what is a person? A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness. You know, the two-year-old dies before the three-year-old shows up, the three-year-old dies before the teenager shows up.
Being a teenager, I would think they were real strict, and I would get upset, but I’m glad they were like that. They didn’t let us do whatever we wanted. We weren’t allowed to date until we were, like, juniors in high school.
It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don’t feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.
I have a lot of tattoos. My first tattoo I had when I was a teenager was just a little heart. I am very friendly with a great artist, Scott Campbell, and I started going to him to get tattoos. I’m very spontaneous about what I get.
You can never empathize with your parents as a teenager. You just think they’re just on another planet.
I think obviously there’s a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s .
When you’ve got a teenager and a pre-teen, especially a son and a daughter, and they’re going at each other at the table, all you really want is just five minutes of quiet, but sometimes I have a moment during the chaos when I think, ‘Yes, this is good.’
I don’t think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
I loved going to the movies, especially when I was a teenager in the seventies. How couldn’t you in what was perhaps the greatest era of auteur cinema?
When I was a young teenager, it was all about The Clash for me and that sort of English punk stuff. Then the Clash led me to all these other kinds of music: classic rock, Stevie Wonder, world music, and Brazilian music. I got serious about jazz when I was probably about 14 or 15.
I was so driven in high school but did sometimes wish I could go out with friends, go to parties, and be a normal teenager. But having mum as my coach at home meant I couldn’t sneak around.
When I was a teenager I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, bouffanting my hair like Patty Duke and trying to recreate Barbra Streisand’s flawless eyeliner, only to comb it all out and wash it all off before stepping out into the world a butchish bisexual teen.
When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.
When I was a teenager, I learned to play the trumpet. Music became my passion.
Especially as a teenager, you were so fond of Schiaparelli because she was slightly extreme, rebellious, and iconoclastic as well. That appeals to teenagers!
I’ve been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.
I just wanted to fit in as a teenager, but it was hopeless.
I love essential oils – there’s one for every problem. It’s kind of like nature’s answers for what to put on your skin. I had acne when I was a teenager, and I did a pretty intense tea tree thing. You dilute it in a base oil, like carrot seed oil, which is good because it gives your face a little glow.
Little kids grow up discovering the world that’s shown to them and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself.
I’m not an academic type in term of personality. I had my share of madness as a teenager.
When I was a teenager, I felt my life was constrained by rules, school, my parents. I wanted to feel like I was empowered and different; that’s why superheroes, comics, manga, and video games filled my needs. When I got older, I realized power is not free; it comes with responsibility.
I was, without exaggeration, a delinquent teenager.
I was a very independent teenager.
People don’t mind insulting the tall. We’re supposed to be fine with being awkward and skinny. I’m very easy to psychoanalyse. I was a gangly, awkward teenager who could make people laugh and thought that was a way to be socially more comfortable.
When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.
I have never limited myself by focusing much on being a ‘normal’ teenager.
In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults 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’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’
Also, when you think about a show that you used to watch as a kid or as a teenager, you look at it through sort of rose colored glasses when you remember it.
I did a CBS thing when I was a teenager that was a ‘Music Minute’ or something.
I do what I wanna do and I see who I wanna see. And when you get into your forties, it’s like being a teenager again, really. Everyone else in their forties thinks they can chat to you.
Everyone, when you’re a teenager and you’re growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it’s not.
I think it magnified it. For me, I wasn’t sheltered so I think it was magnified. Especially when you’re a teenager and you go to high school and you’re in the business and you are known.
When I was a teenager, I worked in New Orleans for a chef named Paul Prudhomme. That was a very important time in my life as a chef. I developed my palate and learned a lot. And here I am now. I specialize in modern Mexican and contemporary Latin cuisines.
‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ its pages heavy with sinners brought low and prayers groaning on the wind, scared me when I read it as a teenager.
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
I think I’ve been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I was always fascinated by the idea that we have these weird, random boundaries between what we do and don’t show.
By the time I was a teenager, I weighed 400 pounds.
I definitely went through a period when I was a teenager when every girl was ‘The One’ and every break-up was the ‘Worst Thing That Had Ever Happened.’
My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.
As a teenager I was crazy about David Bowie. He was a huge inspiration for me. I dressed a little bit crazily in school and dyed my hair every colour under the sun.
I was heavy and overweight as a teenager, so it’s hard to be cocky or egotistical.
In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania.
I always make this joke that I know you were expecting to see the big skirts and the hoops. But that was a long time ago. Artists aren’t always seen as real people. If you start out as a teenager, sometimes people want to keep you locked as that. But I’m a woman now.
In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.
I was always quite outspoken as a teenager and quite cheeky in school and stuff.
