Paul Weller Quotes

In junior high, I really wanted to be popular. Suddenly there were parties with boys, and I wanted to be part of that. There was a group of girls, and I wanted to be friends with them.

In high school, I threw a party to get a guy's attention. I wanted him to think I was cool, so I let him and his friends DJ and basically take over the house.

When I go out with my 16-year-old friends, I don't wear Chanel.

When I was 13 years old, I was dressing in a rap style. And then I changed schools, and the rap style became old-fashioned, so I changed it completely.

Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.

It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

By the time I was a teenager, my desire to be daring and taste everything got me in trouble. Too often, I was in the company of kids my parents would call 'wild.'

I would say there's always a movement of music and fashion in youth culture - every decade inspires the new one.

I wasn't, you know, Mr. Popular. I was somewhere in the middle ground. I was quite alternative, the things I liked to do. Skateboarding, at the time. Playing in a band as opposed to playing in the rugby team. You know, that kind of thing.

When I was young, running with a gang was a cool thing to do; that's how you get popular; that's how you get the girls.

Being an actress is similar to trying to fit in with the popular kids in high school. You're expected to drive the right car, wear the right clothes and say the right things.

The girls want to see the rips on your stomach - they like that.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

My whole thing is that often times when teenagers are about 18, 19, 20, 21, they get this mentality that they have to be old, they have to appear older, they can no longer be seen as a high schooler, they need to be seen as mid-20s all of a sudden, even though they're only, like, 20.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time.

As teenagers, we all see ourselves as outsiders... and it's very easy to look at other people who are more popular, who have more pocket money, and it makes you feel even more like an outsider, and it does shape who you become as a person.

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

In high school, girls started wearing high-waisted pants with their shirts tucked into them. I don't get what that's about.

I've played the violin since I was seven but stopped because there was a stage when it became 'uncool'. I was listening to Nirvana and wanted to play the guitar, so I ditched the violin.

Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

The only place I'm recognized is at the mall, because that's where the teens are.