My formative years were in Jersey and I’m kind of Jersey at heart.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ had a formative effect on me. I think it’s one of those works that if you encounter it very early you’re doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.
In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you’re in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you’re learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way.
Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me – he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.
Most of my formative years were in Chandigarh.
It’s not a deliberate thing. It’s not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It’s just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you’re going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that’s what happened.
A formative cookbook for me was Nigella Lawson’s ‘How to Eat.’ Its warm, conversational tone is wonderful.
My mother’s records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn’t hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n’ roll – so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.
When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken – you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.
The time for me in the Peace Corps was easily the most formative experience I’ve had in my life.
My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical ‘we’re in this together’ sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.
My dad was very fun and very adventurous, and from a formative age I learned to value men who would do things on a whim.
Everyone has an idea over time of what the business should be, and during the formative period, too many opinions could be disruptive.
What I can say, categorically, is that working with Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates will have been the most formative experience for me, as an actor, for the rest of my life.
My formative years were all about ‘Star Wars’ – the first three, not the last crap, obviously. I understood ‘Star Trek’ but it was too caricatured for me.
I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.
I’ve bought clothes based on record covers. Particularly from the formative music that turned me onto it in the first place when I was a kid, with the Beatles and the Small Faces. A lot of those Sixties soul artists were in really sharp sharkskin or mohair suits, and Motown artists looked amazing.
I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.
When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch – they were formative for me. I also read ‘Flash Gordon’ when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I’d have been an imbecile.
Everything I do will always be compared to ‘Love Song’ in terms of success or the way it’s written or whatever, but it was a really formative moment in my life and in my career.
High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you’re paid nothing; you’re playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.
I’ve had such an inspiring and formative journey in my career.
I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There’s a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.
I do come alive in front of a camera. The first video I ever made was a formative moment for me.
Middle school students are at a critical time in their lives when making good choices matters – the decisions they make in these formative years have an impact on their future success.
What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.
A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.
People of Maharashtra are close to my heart, and this is where I became who I am, and this has been instrumental in my formative years.
A big reason why I’m not a big TV watcher is that in my formative years as a viewer, there wasn’t that much great television on, or at least, television that appealed to me.
I read a lot of the ‘Pern books’ growing up – basically up through ‘All the Weyrs of Pern,’ maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she’s probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
That experience of being at Mt. St. Helen’s was really formative. I don’t even know if I’d be a photographer. It was an essential moment for me.
The biographies of the great rarely report much about the nanny, but for many, she will have played a crucial role in their formative years.
The combination of Federalism and Republicanism which formed the substance of the system, did not constitute a progressive and formative political principle, but it pointed in the direction of a constructive formula.
I grew up watching his movies; I know everyone did, but I really feel that a lot of my formative years were informed by Woody Allen films.
It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women’s approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.
Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
My formative years were not spent in Hyderabad, so I can only understand Telugu, but I love the culture.
Fiction was a massive, massive part of my formative years, far more so than television ever was, and I always hoped that my future would lie with writing.
The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it’s wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.
I spent most of my formative years in rural Oregon.
When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.
The things you encounter in your formative years always stay with you.
It was strange, especially because all of the projects I did when I was young, I was always the youngest on set or the only child, so I spent my formative years hanging out with 24-year-olds when I was 13.
My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling.
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