Steve Toltz Quotes

When I was younger, me and my brother got a video camera, and he used to direct and I used to act. We used to make these silly, stupid short films, which, looking back now, were probably horrible.

When you start out as a filmmaker, you do parodies, because you can't really compete on a studio level.

In the past, my aspirations were as arty as they could get, and I'm really embarrassed by it.

I go through my comments sometimes, and I'll just take snapshots of the terrible ones and send them to my friends. I know it's horrible, but they actually make me laugh. They make my day.

I did a church movie one time. I think it exists somewhere that I hope to God no one ever sees. I haven't even seen it. My mom's seen it. My mom was in it.

There's things that I see that I did on videos when I was younger that I be like, 'Damn, I was bugging.' Champagne Dame, that dude, he was bugging. I don't even know that guy.

I'm sure if you see things you wrote when you were 19, you cringe. I saw stuff like angry poetry that I wrote when I was mad at my father, or photos I took where I smeared period blood on myself. It's embarrassing.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.

I have some fond memories - a couple of the nights on the town ... a couple of songs I wrote when I was messed up that I'm sure wouldn't have come out of me unless I was messed up. It's kind of happy-sad about those days - I could do anything I wanted to. I did. And now I don't want to do any of that.

I watch 'The Great British Bake Off' in the way I used to watch people kiss on TV in front of my parents when I was young. Cringe.

I grew up torturing friends and family by making super-8 and VHS epics.

My main goal was to be a cinematographer. I was making short films, and the plan was to keep uploading them on Twitter and build a fanbase there. One day, I just started making music for fun. When I made 'Dat $tick,' it blew up, and I saw the potential in that.

As a young man, I was an absolute idiot. I think my exes would say I was a likeable baby. I had a teenager's bedroom when I was 32.

While working in Bangalore, I was making short films.

I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was.

But I had a strong reaction to my first three albums and I struggle with them now, as an adult. It's very much the same as looking at your teenage photos in high school.

I was neeeever a cool kid.

I was almost as famous at Indiana for my television shows as I was my coaching. That's kind of embarrassing when you think about it.

I do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?

Be it web series, short films, reality shows, what drives and keeps me in the groove is my work.

Sometimes the stuff I come up with is so silly I feel like I need to apologize at the end of every one of them.

It's so embarrassing and painful to be young.

When I got to high school, they had a morning TV show you could become a part of, and I started making short films for that, most little satirical, laugh-y films about the dean of students being chased by a dinosaur or something like that. And I really just enjoyed it.

I'm lucky that I don't have any big regrets. Maybe that undercut hairstyle from my youth.