Quotes About My Twenties

#1. I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one ... Then I thought he was a genus.

Mark Twain

#2. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to Africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce ...

Jacqueline Novogratz

#3. In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years, I did nothing else. Every holiday, I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that.

Peter Lindbergh

#4. In my twenties, I was a huge, insane risk-taker.

James Ransone

#5. I was always searching. I became a Buddhist in my twenties when I came to Los Angeles. I met a group of people who I really loved.

Alley Mills

#6. When I was in my teens and twenties, I could see friends expressing how radical they were, and I envied them, the way they lived, the way they dressed. Maybe there is a part of me that is reserved, even in rebellion.

Susan Minot

#7. But the pain I felt was excruciating. It was as if my life had ended. Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life was over. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had suc potential, then woke up one day and it had gone.

Haruki Murakami

#8. I made a lot of changes in my life between my twenties and thirties, and it all sort of revolves around how I think people with nerdier brains tend to problem-solve and approach things differently then "norms."

Chris Hardwick

#9. I can double my density from three-sixty degrees to seven-twenty instantly.

Canibus

#10. Most people never believed in the real possibility of going to the moon, and neither did I until I was in my twenties.

Buzz Aldrin

#11. I was a freelancer all through my twenties. I did about one story a month and I wanted to write fiction, so the stories that I would do were precursors to 'Sex and the City.'

Candace Bushnell

#12. Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'.
- M.F.K. Fisher A Is for Dining Alone

Jenni Ferrari-Adler

#13. I can't imagine being sixty years of age and playing music I wrote when I was in my twenties. I would rather sail the sea of consequence to new lands. Laps around the shallow end of the pool, not for me.

Henry Rollins

#14. I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn't even know I wasn't living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn't and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.

Shirley Maclaine

#15. When I was in my early twenties, parts would be written for women in their fifties, and I would get them. And now I'm in my early thirties, and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part?' I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it; it's the way things are.

Anne Hathaway

#16. I lived my twenties in a very public manner and if anyone's twenties are documented it's not always going to be pretty.

Sienna Miller

#17. I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

Bill Gates

#18. I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now, except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.

David Bowie

#19. I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older.

Eric McCormack

#20. I've had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness.

Billy Corgan

#21. There ain't no way I'm going to be droppin' nothing. If I was in my twenties, maybe. But now I try to keep it looking decent. I don't want to expose too much of my bare ass.

Sharon Jones

#22. My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

Edward Abbey

#23. When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

Gabrielle Zevin

#24. I don't want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.

Zainab Salbi

#25. Great sadness can be off putting, hard to comprehend, especially if it hasn't been your experience. It's amazing for me to know now that AIDS, for instance, is something a lot of people don't "get," whereas it entirely shaped my social life since the time I was twenty until I was almost forty.

Hilton Als

#26. When I got out of my Twenties I stopped playing women that were victims. I like playing women who are strong and have a piece of mind.

Kim Cattrall

#27. My father took me aside one day soon after and told me this: The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. But as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever.

Jessica Valenti

#28. When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties, and my mom lived there, too, I used to take her 'storm chasing' - by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm.

Jenna Blum

#29. I wouldn't want my daughters to date a guy like me. I was dangerous around women in my twenties. I'm terrified that they might end up with someone like me.

Antonio Banderas

#30. When I was in my twenties, it felt like I was riding wild horses, and I was hoping I didn't go over a cliff.

Chaka Khan

#31. I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

Hugh Hefner

#32. When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.

Moby

#33. All through my twenties, I lived in very walkable cities - Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York.

Elizabeth Banks

#34. The thought of giving up alcohol crossed my mind too, but I was soon reminded of the promise to Ketel One, Grey Goose, and other top-shelf vodkas that I had made in my early twenties. Never turn your back on someone who has asked nothing in return.

Chelsea Handler

#35. I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.

Julia Quinn

#36. Nobody wants to say, "I'm trying to get my feet on the ground" when they're in their twenties. They want you to think they're about to do something dangerous, or exciting, or different. We're not "living at home," we're "crashing until we can afford a pad in Brooklyn.

Alida Nugent

#37. New York is a fun town to go out in. During my twenties and into my thirties I had a good time partying, yes. But nothing where I woke up and I thought that I had a problem.

Will Ferrell

#38. I mentally attacked myself for most of my teens and twenties before I learned how to love myself in my thirties.

Jenn Sadai

#39. I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me.

George Clooney

#40. I have been looking forward to this age of my life for a long time. In my twenties, I marked the days on the calendar - I was sick of playing high-school kids.

Rob Lowe

#41. I went through all my twenties thinking that I wasn't good enough.

Delta Burke

#42. My church accepts all denominations - fivers, tenners, twenties.

Dave Allen

#43. Twenty years from now, I hope I'm consistently in my life, in the zone. I have seen the next year before.

Meredith Brooks

#44. Everyone - particularly my female friends I speak to - all say 'I wouldn't be in my twenties again if I was paid.' It's a difficult time.

Miranda Hart

#45. I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.

David Nicholls

#46. My twenties were my practice. My thirties were when I really hit my stride with GoPro and did all the heavy lifting to build the business.

Nick Woodman

#47. I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

Winona Ryder

#48. I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties.

Lydia Davis

#49. The first twenty years of my life were wasted ... I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.

Rose Wilder Lane

#50. Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.

A.E. Housman

#51. I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.

Junot Diaz

#52. I've been a much happier person in my early thirties than I was in my twenties.

Jake Shears

#53. I've been performing since the 60s and I made my first album in 1969, so it's been a bit over twenty years.

Thelma Houston

#54. It's hard to say that my twenties were the most miserable time in my life or that my first wife drove me crazy or that I hated the job that I had. You can say all of those things. But for the most part, people manage to have a good time when they're that age.

Frank Stella

#55. I was a bit of a lost lamb in my twenties, trying to find my higher calling.

Abigail Disney

#56. I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her.

Susanna Clarke

#57. By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

Eric Drooker

#58. In my twenties, I was determined to change the world. In my thirties, I tried to transform the church. In my early forties, I discovered I was the problem.

Jeff Iorg

#59. I think, for the majority of my twenties, I was always so concerned with what I didn't have, or what I still wanted.

Adam Lambert

#60. I like myself a lot more than I used to. I had a very difficult time in my twenties especially. It was hard for me to look in the mirror and find something that I liked about myself.

Janet Jackson

#61. I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

Joyce Carol Oates

#62. I started going gray in my early twenties.

Matt LeBlanc

#63. It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Karen Russell

#64. When I was a young college teacher in my mid-twenties, an older colleague delighted in characterizing post-Enlightenment theology as "flat-tire theology" - "All the pneuma has gone out of it.

Marcus J. Borg

#65. I played pretty well in my twenties, don't get me wrong! But my consistency is better [in my thirties], my momentum is better, my wins are quicker.

Serena Williams

#66. I grew up in the South but I started dancing in my twenties when I got out of the Air Force, and studying dance, you're surrounded by gay guys all the time. You get to know them and you have to shift gears!

Morgan Freeman

#67. I've been drunk only once in my life. But that lasted for twenty-three years.

W.C. Fields

#68. I might have had too many friends in my twenties. I probably said yes too much, and then I had to learn how to say no. How to get away in order to work on stuff.

Chadwick Boseman

#69. In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic. It wasn't that I had stopped believing in God; it's just that God didn't seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented.

Maya Angelou

#70. There was a girl who came up to me on the street the other day, she bloomed out of the pavement ... and she must have been in her early twenties, and she said to me, 'You are my childhood.' About the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. -JK Rowling

J.K. Rowling

#71. This story didn't end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero nor a villain in my life.

Mindy Kaling

#72. My kids have moved more in their twenties, you know, than my parents have moved in nearly 40-something years of marriage before they died. So there's a part of me that laments what we have lost, and that is a sense of community.

Mike Huckabee

#73. This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch.

Louise Penny

#74. I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player - small, quiet, long-haired and 'wiry.'

Anthony Browne

#75. I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties.

Pedro Almodovar

#76. I think about what I wish I had known when I was a teen and tween. I struggled with a lot of insecurity and self-doubt as a young girl and the side-effects of that were long lasting, well into my late twenties.

Deborah Reber

#77. I should be more vocal about the things I believe are doing us harm, but many years ago in my early twenties, I learned a bit of a lesson. I started to realise at that time the benefits of eating healthy food and drink.

Jasper Carrott

#78. It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.

Edward Gibbon

#79. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

W. H. Auden

#80. I never enjoyed life in my twenties, not one minute of it. It was a test of endurance that I'm surprised I survived. Professionally, of course, I was doing very well but personally it couldn't have been worse or more difficult for me if I'd been living in a mud hut in Leeds.

Steven Morrissey

#81. I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.

Richard K. Morgan

#82. As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.

Theodore Sturgeon

#83. I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

Dani Shapiro

#84. I've never really socialized; I've always been anti-social and preferred to be at home. I was never, even my late teens and early twenties, into clubs and parties and stuff like that.

Megan Fox

#85. I regret waiting until my mid-twenties to really start seeing the world. I think I should have taken more risks when I was younger and worried less about being ready to grow up.

John Corey Whaley

#86. I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.

Cynthia Ozick

#87. I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours.

Mark Twain

#88. How insane would it have been to know Chloe in my early twenties? We would have torn this place up, and probably lasted only a weekend. Isn't it amazing how you meet the person you're meant to meet, when you're supposed to meet her?

Christina Lauren

#89. In my early twenties, I had no idea who I was. And I think that's one reason you should try different relationships. I've had good and bad ones, but I took away things from them that helped me become who I am.

Cobie Smulders

#90. Sometime when I was in my mid-twenties I noticed, "Hey, even I don't go into too many art galleries. Why? Because I don't like the vibe in them. If even I'm not going into galleries, then who goes into art galleries in the first place?" It's just a certain, very narrow percentage of the population.

Eric Drooker

#91. My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it.

Zadie Smith

#92. I floundered in my twenties. Though I wore a long scarf. And when I got to be thirty I got a job at Temple University in Philadelphia. I worked there for seven years, and I finally got fired, mostly for political reasons.

Gerald Stern

#93. It's very difficult to play opposite nothing. I did it for, like, six years - I ran from an invisible smoke monster for most of my twenties.

Evangeline Lilly

#94. I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

Helen Vendler

#95. I've never really been on a date, because I've been with the same girl since my early twenties, but on our first date, I showed her The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was like, "Hey, you've got to see this!" And we've been together ever since.

Nicolas Winding Refn

#96. Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

Barry Diller

#97. At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.

Susan Faludi

#98. Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.

Matthew Specktor

#99. I read all of the books by Tolkien, including 'The Hobbit,' when I was in my twenties, and his deep love of nature and all things green resonates deeply with me.

Howard Shore

#100. If my childhood, teens, and twenties were about wanting people to like me, now I want people to know me. So,

Mindy Kaling