After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.
I grew up in a very fundamentalist, evangelical Christian household. Both my parents were born-again - their faith infused every aspect of my childhood. I'll probably spend most of my life working through that.
I was born in Orange, California and I grew up in Huntington Beach. I started skateboarding when I was five and continued to do so off and on over the years.
Every demo I do has a mandolin or resonator on it - some element of the bluegrass or classic country world that I grew up listening to and that first drew me in. And then I always try to find somewhere for a bluesy guitar sound, because that's also what I love. Musically, I'm always finding my way home.
I grew up watching British comedy on TV, really.
I grew up in an agricultural family, and I never distanced myself from where the food comes from. I think it's quite natural.
When I started acting, one of the first things I learned was - especially in Hollywood - was branding. I'm a tall guy. I'm like, 'Yeah, that's probably going to be my foot in the door,' because that's my impression on everybody. I'm an athletic guy, and I think, because I grew up disliking jocks so much, that became, like, the character for me.
I grew up in a farm town in Indiana. In the early years I played by myself, because there were no other musicians around.
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
I grew up as a child living 'Red Dawn.' I was leaping out of spider holes, mowing down Russkies at the age of eight.
I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.
I'm not going to do anything crazy, but I want to do music that I'm passionate about. I'm finally at an age where I can do the music that I grew up loving, which was urban pop, '90s music. I grew up listening to the divas, so I'm very happy to finally do urban pop. I hope that it's received well, and it has been so far.
I grew up in society when lots of things were hidden, and they were not hidden just one way, but it was very complicated.
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
My manager got the script for 'Under the Dome,' and I read it and just fell in love with the character. I grew up on Stephen King, and I love his whole aesthetic of the classic American story with supernatural events happening, so it just made sense.
When I grew up in Tasmania, you thought that London was home. You waited to go to England as soon as you graduated, in my case on a ship bound for London via Genoa.
I've never been a social person. When I grew up, the other girls would all be combing their hair and exchanging lipstick, and I just couldn't do that group thing.
I grew up pretty much entertaining myself. So I know what its like to be in a room by myself and having fun with something.
I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.
I grew up so poor in Austria that we never took a vacation with my family.
I grew up with my mom always talking to everyone everywhere, whether it was professionally or in a coffee shop. And my dad was the same way. So I love being able to talk to people, hear their stories and be inspired.
I love my complexion, but like so many of us, in the early years at primary school, I grew up thinking that my dark skin wasn't a great thing. I've found freedom in music and songwriting, which has given me a freedom in how I present myself. I'm glad I've got makeup to celebrate that with.
I always felt a little bit of an outsider, especially because I grew up on Oahu.
You have an entire generation of kids who grew up with the idea that music is something that you can download for free.
I do things that are very uncharacteristic of a normal workout routine. I hate cardio. Absolutely hate it. I grew up as a wrestler, so it was constant cardio, cardio, cardio.
I grew up in New York, and I've always been surrounded by fashion. My grandmother used to write for 'Vogue' in the '50s, and my mother was a dancer and a model.
The blatant aggressiveness of theocracies I find distressing, because I grew up when Christians, Muslim and animists lived peacefully together.
It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.
My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant.
Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.
I grew up with my mom being very, very cheap, so when it's free, I'm like, 'Oh my God, it's free - I have to take as much as I can!'
I'm a pretty feminized geek, you know? I have that point of view, I grew up around a lot of girls, so I'm pretty sensitive to that. But I don't dare say 'I know how women think.'
Holland was one of the first countries to adopt dance music into their culture, and we were the first ones to have really big raves. I grew up in that atmosphere in the early 1990s, and I was very interested in how dance music was made.
I dreaded having a boring life when I grew up. And I certainly can't complain about being bored.
I grew up Catholic, so I have these defenses about listening to anything with too much religiosity; some of the lyrics didn't sit well in my mouth. One of my beefs is the patriarchal setup. Having the 'he, he, he, God, God, God, king, king, king' stuff was hard for me.
