Top 88 Formative Quotes

If women’s choices – such as taking time off to rear children – make them less productive in the economy, does adolescent boys’ behavior in school make them even less so, because they are missing the educational potential of their formative years?

If you look at why people become wack as they get older, it’s because they stop doing the things they did that were formative to their work. You can’t mentally stay still. You can’t not challenge yourself.

I was a huge fan of ‘Blade Runner.’ That was a pretty formative film for me growing up. It really got my sci-fi juices flowing, as it were.

My first pilot gig, in fact my first job in television, was ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and the experience of directing that pilot was probably the single most formative of my directing life.

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high.

While still in college, I started my first Internet company – American Information Systems – a dial-up Internet provider in the Internet’s formative years.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with ‘Loony Tunes’), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte.

I think Woody Allen calls it ‘anxiety of influence.’ When you’re in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies… For Wes Anderson, it’s Truffaut. I’m sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme.

I did go to Beijing, with a two-year assignment. I stayed four years. And those four years were the most formative four years in my life. What I learned was more than I would have learned in 10 years in America or Europe, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I was raised in a group home for 14 years, so I was a beneficiary of philanthropy. I didn’t have a family. The nameless, faceless strangers were my family. They gave me an education, put food on the table and clothes on my back. I am who I am because of that formative experience. Now I am paying it forward.

A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.

My formative years were in Houston. I was in middle school, and everyone was dropping the last half of their names and adding an ‘o’ to the end. My little crew that I had, we were an all-female rap group, and everyone had an ‘o’ at the end of their name. I was Lisso. Then this dude started getting lazy with it, saying Lizzo.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don’t think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music – even The Who now cite him as an influence. There’s an intense, dirty harmony, but there’s a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to the race track, and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that.

My formative years would be in South Central Los Angeles. It was a really volatile environment, but, I always say, when you’re living in the hood, you don’t live this life where you’re crying every day, downtrodden every day.

There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.

As well as being a creative genius, Vidal Sassoon was a formative figure of the Sixties. Along with the Pill and the mini-skirt, his influence was truly liberating.

I’d never been one for leaving the comforts of home. That person wasn’t me; I didn’t spend my formative years youth-hostelling round Rwanda or climbing Everest in a tie-dye playsuit to raise awareness of something or other.

In my early formative years, back in the territory days, if a guy didn’t get along for whatever reason or didn’t get over or things didn’t work out, or he just wanted to relocate, he had other territories to go to to make, if not the same amount of money, substantially more or less.

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts – understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that’s changing the whole story.

I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I’m no stranger to that sort of landscape.

I came up during the formative years of TV.

My mother was a politician in my formative years.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it’s so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

I think if I’d been born ten years earlier when Ma was at the height of ‘Avengers’ fame, it would have been a different kettle of fish altogether, but she was very much a ma first and an actress second for my formative years.

Probably the most formative experience was reading the ‘Foundation’ trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn’t the first science fiction I had ever read, but it’s something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.

I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I’m less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic.

During our formative years, it was all about, ‘What did Metallica do?’ and ‘How do we do that?’ and then you try and find an identity of your own, but they’re still… They were the pioneers and the trailblazers.

I have had my share of choices and temptations, too; I would not lie about that. And I would also like to confess that had it not been for my mother, I would probably have never been able to make the right decisions during those formative years of my life.

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That’s certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.

Who’d have thought that living life like a dime store floozy throughout your formative years could negatively affect your decision-making ability or long-term, future relationships?

That period, doing ‘Angels in America’ in ’94 and then filming with ‘Basquiat’ in ’95, those were gateway years for me as an artist. Two gateways, one into the film industry and one into the world of theater, each formative to me in different, equally essential ways.

It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness.

During Manmohan Singh’s formative years, it was a matter of great pride to be called to the Indian Civil Service for serving the Empire.

Probably the most formative thing was at the age of four my Granddad took me fishing. That actually became a major part of the rest of my life.

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O’Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.

I love the Zucker brothers’ films – ‘Airplane!,’ ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Police Squad!’ – are my formative experiences.

We were teens in the Eighties, and that’s the kind of music that we all grew up on. When you’re in those really formative years, from, like, 13 to 19, what you listen to is so influential, and I think that’s just part of our being now.

I don’t think I have ever done anything for this age of children before, a pre-school audience. Generally speaking, we don’t have vivid memories of that age and what influenced us, yet clearly they are hugely formative years and it’s really important that we can create television of a high quality for that audience.

When you’re a child, and you’re growing up, and you’re mimicking a certain character, or you’re trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you’re playing into your real life and kind of become that thing.

I wasn’t prepared for the environment I encountered trying to break into television news. In the world of music, where I spent my formative years, we were judged solely on our talent, and gender wasn’t a factor.

I’m a child of the ’80s, so like everyone else, I love all those classic, formative movies – ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ ‘Pretty in Pink,’ ‘Sixteen Candles,’ ‘Dirty Dancing,’ etc., with ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ and ‘The Breakfast Club’ existing on a separate, slightly higher plane.

When I was nine, I found a copy of ‘Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series’ in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.