Formative Experiences Quotes

You never get away from that thing in your hometown that it has over you. You don't outgrow where you come from.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

To me, it wasn't 'Star Wars' that shaped me; it was more 'Mary Tyler Moore' and, nowadays, 'Louie' and 'Girls.'

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I came up not understanding that a lot of people didn't start to hear music until they went to college or were turned on by an older brother or sister.

Nobody wants to get rid of their life experiences - you are who you are because of them, no matter if they're good or bad.

I have always been true to the people who have influenced me as a young boy.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

When I was a kid, I was taken to something called Telenews in Cleveland by my best friend's father. My own father was gone by the time I was 5, I think, but this man would take us to Telenews at the end of World War II, and we'd watch all these newsreels. I'd seen real stuff. That kind of stuck in my mind.

I went through a few phases of finding myself: I dabbled in musical theater, chess club, dance troupe, splatter-painting, school mascot (go Wildcats), babysitter, photojournalist, drill team girl, emo kid - and not one of them defined me, but every single one will always play a part in who I am.

I was a diligent little boy at my primary school and then I went to public school and became mediocre at most things and pretty rubbish at others. I had a really tough time. I didn't enjoy it at all. But it made me the man I am today.

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

I don't know, when I was a kid, when I would see shows that changed my life, I would go to see shows where there was my mother taking us to see classic rock concerts, like Zeppelin, or when I saw Pink Floyd or when I saw, you know, when I was a little older, and I saw Nine Inch Nails, and I saw The Cure.

Seeing 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' was an extraordinary experience because it made me realise that all the biblical stories and images I'd ignored as a child had sunk in by osmosis. I saw that my childhood was deeply rooted inside me.

We're all products of our own environment.

Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.

At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks.

My childhood shaped the person I became. It was artistic, musical and left-wing.

What formed me as a musician, a songwriter, the sound and personality of my band, a whole lot of that happened well before 1991.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

I was raised, I feel like, on television, definitely a child of TV, and was always fascinated by storytelling.

Everybody I interacted with in my life, directly or indirectly, has placed a fingerprint upon my life. That combination has made me who I am.

My family grew up in Florence. There I became what I am now, and those are things that cannot be forgotten.

The truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It's under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.