adolescent aspirations Quotes

I decided I wanted to be a painter, and then that moved into wanting to be an animator. By adolescence, I just wanted it to be something that was important...something that would make a difference in people's lives or leave an imprint in history.

When I'm performing for the people, I am me, then. I am that little girl who, when she was five years old, used to sing at church. Or I'm that 15-year-old young lady who wanted to be grown and wanted to sing and couldn't wait to be smokin' a cigarette, you know?

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

The name 'Clara' is significant in my life. When I was an adolescent and started thinking about my place in the world as an adult and growing up, I knew I would have an eventually new outlook on things and eventually meet someone and have a kid. In my mind, I was like, 'If I have a daughter, I want to name her Clara.'

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

What was my dream when I was 18? My big decision when I was 18 was full keg or pony-size keg. I knew by about 16 or 17 that I was going to be an actor. That was based on the fact that there were not a lot of things that I could be really good at, or that I would enjoy enough to not run out of the building screaming.

Why do children want to grow up? Because they experience their lives as constrained by immaturity and perceive adulthood as a condition of greater freedom and opportunity. But what is there today, in America, that very poor and very rich adolescents want to do but cannot do? Not much: they can do drugs, have sex, make babies, and get money (from their parents, crime, or the State). For such adolescents, adulthood becomes synonymous with responsibility rather than liberty. Is it any surprise that they remain adolescents?

When I was young, I wanted to be like the rappers. I remember being in junior high and wanting a fisherman hat and a link because EPMD had one. I wanted to wear Adidas because Run-DMC wore Adidas. As I came into my own, I just wanted to do me.

When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea.

In high school, I had a teacher there who was really great to me and with whom I finally dared to admit I wanted to be a writer myself, and we did a project where I wrote terrible, 17-year-old fiction. But I remember a couple of the stories. I'd love it if I could read with pride something that I wrote that long ago, but it hasn't happened yet.

I didn't really know I wanted to act when I was a child. I have a lot of interests, and I really wanted to finish my education - go to college - and didn't really want to have a career as an adolescent.

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.