A Quote by Elena Kagan
It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.
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I would do the baby voice and it's kind of like this character I made up. But in real life, I'm completely different. I'm very smart. I think a lot of people will assume I'm an airhead.
Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
I'm not an actress; I'm not a singer. I guess I'm in the entertainment industry, but I'm in a different category. Hopefully, a young girl will see me and think, Oh, I want to be a chef! Or, She's a mom, too? Oh, cool, I didn't know you could do both! I want to empower people so they don't have to feel like they're putting themselves in a box. Growing up, I only saw one thing, and it's great that we're changing the mold and paving our own paths.
I encountered Newton when I was growing up, and it has kind of made me who I am, although I came to love Boston. It's a complicated city. Some of the smartest people in the world are in Boston. How many institutions of higher learning are in that one area? It's a pool of intelligence. It's a great town. You can encounter racism anywhere. I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about Boston. It was a cool place to grow up.
I kind of grew up a guitar nerd and I tried to figure out how to shred on an acoustic guitar as a kid, while listening to jazz or whatever. So that is kind of a different thing and my church background, growing up with worship kind of the ground that I learned how to play music from. Those are all odd ways of growing up, compared to most people, so I think the music has plenty of uniqueness in that.
I get up when I feel like getting up. That's the deal I've made with myself: I can stay in bed as long as my dog's bladder holds. The other half of that deal is that once the dog is walked, the very next thing I do is write. It's mechanical. It's programming, very nearly brainwashing.
Michael Vick is a work in progress. I think he really is wanting to do the right thing. I think the Philadelphia Eagles have been a great organization for him. He's had some ups and downs. He still has to learn to not put himself in, maybe bad situations, in terms of personal life and friends, and that kind of thing. But all in all, I think he's growing every day.
I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?
I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.
I was terribly shy when I was growing up, I really wasn't confident with other people and I think I was always afraid of up or not being this very cool, amazing person that I wanted to be.
I didn't have the easiest childhood. I was never the popular girl in school growing up. I was always the lone black girl or the lone fat girl or the long tall girl, so that has made me more compassionate to all people. It also gave me the drive and ambition to go after my dreams in a big way.
At a horror movie, you can see other people dealing with the scary things. They can bolster you. You can think, 'Okay, if that guy can deal with it, I can deal with it.' There are lessons to be learned there, as opposed to having a frivolous popcorn experience. I think some of this stuff is good for your soul.
There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up - my dad played, and I thought it was cool - and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I'm very pleased about now.
I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.
If I was a young director starting off, there's so many tools at your disposal now to do things relatively inexpensively that it's a great time to learn your chops and do some cool music videos. If I started all over again, I'd still be doing music videos, I'd just be doing them very differently. It's very difficult for me to do them now, but for young kids out there that love music and want to tackle a different art form - and I do think music video is an art form - that's a very cool thing to do.
I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.
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