For me, growing up felt like a roller coaster ride at times, but looking back, I don't think that it was such a bad thing. It was all part of the excitement of being young.
I'd never really considered film. If I'd thought about film more growing up, I probably would have changed my name. I had no concept of my name in lights.
Potomac School proved to be my first big adjustment - one that helped me with a basic lesson of growing up: learning to get along in whatever world one is deposited.
Growing up, I was in all the musicals and everything... I'd come home from school and bash out a few Whitney Houston songs.
I was growing up with a single mom who'd be at work when I came home from school. So I'd just turn on the TV. I grew up watching old Clint Eastwood westerns. I adopted him as one of my male role models.
There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever.
I got my influences from '70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released 'Money,' it wouldn't even get played.
I was always very academically focused when I was growing up, and music was something for which I really had no preconceptions or expectations for myself or really any rules. It kind of represented, at least for me, a divergent path of creativity and self-discovery.
Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.
I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.
I love 'The Stand;' I read it when I was a kid - it was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. I love Stephen King; I think he's a remarkable writer.
Single parent situations drive poverty and often lead to unsupervised kids. Many boys growing up without fathers often feel angry and abandoned. Thus, they seek comfort in all the wrong places.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
I hate that word, mature, but I guess I am growing up.
As a kid growing up in a small town in Washington State, my only exposure to New York City was through movies. The town with its towering skyscrapers, fascinating people and teeming energy absolutely captivated me.
I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I've been using them throughout my career, but they've never taken center stage, they've never been really powerful, they've never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.
I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Chris Farley, I was a huge fan of his growing up. I would love to do something kind of slapstick and funny, maybe where I could change my look even a little bit.
Growing up, just singing in bands, I didn't have the same kind of voice as everyone else.
Growing up, I had an insane crush on Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
When I was a kid growing up, my dad being a football coach, he asked the same question of all the assistants that he ever hired: 'Is your goal to be a head football coach?'
Sometimes I feel people can move past what they've grown up around and their surroundings while in a place and some people need closure after they've left and then coming back. I've seen it happen with people I knew growing up that hated each other, and then years later you go home and you see them walking down the street and they have babies.
Growing up, I always loved Disney movies, but the first movie I remember seeing is 'Sleepers,' so I wasn't really taken to children's movies.
Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.
My gender has never been an issue or a limitation. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by strong women growing up, and with them as my role models, I was never limited by the traditional roles women find themselves in.
I watched a lot of old television growing up - a lot of Nick at Nite. I watched 'Rhoda', 'Mary Tyler Moore', and 'I Love Lucy.' Growing up, I loved 'My So Called Life' and was devastated when that went off the air.
When we were growing up our parents somehow made it clear that being famous was good. And I mistakenly thought that if I was famous then everyone would love me.
My father never wanted me to be a writer. He didn't - he came to terms with it maybe two years before he died. He wanted me to be a weather girl because when I was growing up, there were very few Latinas on television, and in the early '70s when you first started seeing Latinas on TV, they would be the weather girls.
All of us growing up, if you're a professional player or a college player, you're molding your game after guys. You see guys, you see things guys do. Like Randy Moss, I'm a Randy Moss guy.
When I was growing up, I did go to the arcade. We had a neighborhood arcade, and my friends and I would go fairly regularly.
A lot of times, I faced bullies - or the 'big dogs' at school. What I wanted 'Red Rising' to be is not necessarily an indictment on bullies, but it reflects my experiences and attitudes that I had with bullies growing up.
If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.
When I was growing up in Ossining, N.Y., playing pool with the guys, the thought that any one of us might become an actor was as far-fetched as being knighted by the queen of England.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
There's a certain type of character that you can't help but come in contact with growing up and living in Brooklyn and Long Island. A certain mixture of moxie, heart, and a wise guy sense of humor.
Honestly, I think, as an artist, it's everything that's in your life that informs what you do. So, obviously, growing up in Cleveland has played a big role in how I see the world.
