Mike White Quotes

I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don't think I took my whole self with me - I think I played a role of being too cool and hip.

I grew up all around the world, and when I settled in a suburb in America, I didn't have any idea what I was supposed to wear.

Los Angeles is a really strange place. I grew up there like a normal kid, but it was not until I experienced other parts of the world that I realized how really and truly bizarre to the core it is - inside the homes of the powerful and damaged.

In terms of theater, there's not a more supportive theater community than in New York. It's really kind of a real thrill to go there. I mean, don't forget, I'm a boy from the suburbs of Sydney, so getting to New York is a huge, huge thrill.

When I lived in New York City, I loved it so much. But every six months, I had to go home to Texas to remember who I was. Get filled back up.

By the time I went to college, I had totally embraced my Indianness, but I still didn't tell anyone I could sing.

I come from the Midwest, from the suburbs - growing up hanging out at the mall and looking at the corn fields across the street. I kind of was embarrassed by it for a long time. Then I decided, 'Hey, if everyone else can embrace their homeland and where they're from, I can do the same!'

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

I was just a young kid out of Mexico, Missouri, and then Kansas City, having an opportunity to play at the University of Nebraska, where I grew as a man.

A hipster is someone who's very aware of his style.

The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.

The way that I feel about my Jewish identity has been really radically changed by events in life. Like, becoming a writer is one. Having children is another. And getting older and watching, you know, my parents and grandparents get older has been another, the seasons of - being witness to the seasons of life and wanting to have some kind of infrastructure to deal with it, to cope with them. Ritual has become more important to me as I've gotten older. It's not always religious ritual, but it often borrows from Judaism.

I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.

I think what Jewish culture taught me and what the - and Jewish culture now is everyone's culture - is all these embarrassing things, all these guilt-filled things, all these anxiety filled things are material.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

We were taught to be free-thinking, independent, to look at your goals. And that old saying, you could never go home was never true in my community. We always felt like we could go home.

In school, writing was the only thing that really came naturally to me, but it wasn't until college that I realized that I could do it for more than just fun.

It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.

I've grown up a lot. I've become more independent. I can talk to my parents more like friends. When I was going to college, I was still only an hour away from them.Now, after Idol and touring all over the place, I feel like I have become a lot more independent.

FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.

She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons.