Top 100 Quotes About The 20s
#1. I feel bad for young people. The 20s are a nightmare also. The 20s are hard to do.
Joy Behar
#2. J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s.
Terence Winter
#3. I'd grown up with a lot of women. My mother was a famous lesbian in the '20s and '30s, and I grew up with only women, so I was used to getting on with them.
Patrick Macnee
#4. In the 20s, you were a face. And that was enough. In the 30s, you also had to be a voice. And your voice had to match your face, if you can imagine that.
Joan Blondell
#5. I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Terry Teachout
#6. The designs were based on quite a lot of research of what a movie musical is, filtered through the eyes of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement would have been impaired.
Colleen Atwood
#8. If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it's the worst stuff that's mired in pop music.
Colin Meloy
#9. Francisco Garcia could have been a high draft choice last year, probably in the 20s. He's the best wing player I've ever coached. But he's done it the right way. He knew he had to work on his body to become a good pro. When he goes into the pros, he'll be physically ready.
Rick Pitino
#10. How have I lived so long? I never worried. In the '20s, there were millions of men out of work. You couldn't get a job anywhere. I wasn't worried.
Henry Allingham
#11. It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?
James Vincent McMorrow
#12. One of the reasons I wrote 'Airborn' was that I'd fallen in love with the great passenger airships which flew in the '20s and '30s. Their time was short-lived. They were frail, they tended to crash; and they could never be as fast, safe and efficient as the airplanes that replaced them.
Kenneth Oppel
#13. The Italian mafia, they're very [into] construction. They're in a whole different way of operating than they did back in the '20s.
Robert Loggia
#14. We don't agree with the depiction of buildings in the '20s and 1930s. Things were seen either from above or below which tended to monumentalize the object. This was exploited in terms of a socialistic view - a fresh view of the world, a new man, a new beginning.
Bernd Becher
#15. There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
Jack Vance
#16. Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.
Kerry Greenwood
#17. Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.
Wynton Marsalis
#18. I do think taking the 20s to take the most chances you can is important, because you're not going to hurt anyone else during that time. And if you do have a partner, you need a couple years to rehearse that relationship.
Gail Sheehy
#19. I looked at a lot of photos from Hollywood in the '20s, photographs of silent movies being filmed all over the world which are very specific and very evocative. Berenice, the lead actress, is my wife. She really followed the same path with me.
Michel Hazanavicius
#20. Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything.
Zooey Deschanel
#22. The Berlin of the '20s formed the foundation of my future education ... the Berlin of the UFA studios, of Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Erich Pommer. The Berlin of the architects Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. The Berlin of the painters Max Libermann, Grosz, Otto Dix, Klee and Kandinsky.
Ken Adam
#23. We have been helping, trying to help Afghanistan in many ways, even from the beginning of ... the beginnings of the '20s, 1920s, when he we were fighting our own national struggle.
Bulent Ecevit
#24. In the '20s they were telling us we'd all have our own private plane and take vacations to the moon.
Jay Chiat
#25. Like traditional upper class families, there are nannies and servants, and the children, you know, come in to say good-night before they go to bed. There's very little private time with the children in the early years. Actually, there's much more private time with the children in the 20s.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#26. It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.
Julian Ovenden
#27. 'Boardwalk' begins literally on the first day of Prohibition, which I think was a wonderful way to start - to have the story kind of come out of this massive historical phenomenon. And the more I researched the '20s, the more I discovered just how interesting it was.
Michael Pitt
#28. My dad's father was a White Star Line trumpet player in the '20s. It shaped the way that I think about music. My grandfather was classically trained, military trained. He was an orphan who ended up in the Military School of Music in Kneller Hall.
Elvis Costello
#29. It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'
Lily James
#30. For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
Flea
#31. The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.
Billy Connolly
#32. I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.
Michael Sheen
#33. The 20s are like the stem cell of human development: the pluripotent moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions during this time have lasting ramifications.
Robin Marantz Henig
#34. I think I'd just like to get in a time machine and travel and never come back. The '20s would be an incredible place to be, dressing up in tuxedos with fancy cars. That sounds incredible.
Victor Webster
#35. Despite the fact that childbearing has been delayed into the 20s and 30s, the brain still expects this to happen at 12 or 13 years of age.
Louis Cozolino
#36. Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.
Francesca Annis
#37. When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.
Michael Graves
#38. I have a very 'theatre' face. I have what they call a wide mask. I probably would have been a big film star in the '20s with the silent films where they used a lot of key lighting, and make-up carved out your face.
Faith Prince
#39. I love that period, between the '20s and the '60s. I love doing period pieces, and those eras are my favorite period in time, music wise, and the elegance and the way of being.
Laz Alonso
#40. I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.
Tyne Daly
#41. In the '20s and '30s, there were these musicals either set on college campuses or based on classical stories, so any of the Rodgers and Hart musicals certainly influenced me. I was definitely influenced by any of the 'Porgy' songs; I was influenced by 'American Pie.'
Douglas Carter Beane
#42. I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.
Linda Ronstadt
#43. There's nothing more fun than putting on an old costume and jewelry and being in a house that's decorated from the '20s or '30s or whatever.
Mariana Klaveno
#44. I can say is usually people are slightly confused. They think that silent movies are old. But, the fact is, they are old because they have been made in the '20s. That's the thing that makes them old. Not the format. The format is just a format. It's not an old format.
Michel Hazanavicius
#45. Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
James Carriger Paine
#46. I am perhaps being a bit facetious but if some of my good Baptist brethren in Georgia had done a little preaching from the pulpitagainst the K.K.K. in the '20s, I would have a little more genuine American respect for their Christianity!
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#47. The '20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we're in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.
Norman Rockwell
#48. When I was in my 20s, I was a bookworm - spent 12 hours of the day in the library. How I met George, I'll never know.
Laura Bush
#49. I didn't have a teenage or early-20s experience that was free and without worry. I missed the screw-everything, have-a-good-time phase.
Sandra Bullock
#50. I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.
Tyler Cowen
#51. When I was young and crazy, I was young and crazy. It can be hard enough just to BE in your teens and 20s. Then add fame, money, access, and every single person telling you that you're the greatest person who ever was, and it can be a recipe for disaster. Some people literally don't survive it.
Rob Lowe
#52. I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#53. The video for 'Whatever' is kind of a documentary in a way. It's showing that love can last. Not just in your early 20s or your late 30s, but in your 50s, 60s and 70s. There's an awful myth out there that when you get married, love and lovemaking fade. It's not true.
Jill Scott
#54. During the late '20s my father left us. My mother was in a complete hole with no money, and we were evicted.
Vidal Sassoon
#55. I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.
Stephen Hawking
#56. In the early '20s, with the war over, there was a period of celebration, and you can see it in the fashion.
Michelle Dockery
#57. I really get pursued by men in their 20s, like, a lot. They probably know there's food in the fridge and that somebody's going to talk to them and ask them how their day was.
Sharon Stone
#58. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.
Linwood Barclay
#59. When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.
Garrison Keillor
#60. Though all the daughters eventually succeeded in escaping from their families, they felt, even at this time of the interview (while in their 20s and 30s) that they would never be safe with their fathers, and that they would have to defend themselves as long as their fathers lived.
Judith Lewis Herman
#61. I guess I must just be obsessed with death. Apparently you think about it a lot more as you get older. Maybe you could chart how when I was in my 20s I talked about sex all the time, and in my 40s it's just death.
David Shrigley
#62. Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.
Martin Scorsese
#63. Sailing became one of the mainstreams of my life. I suppose my father was an influence. I remember seeing a photo of him at home sailing a big boat to Bermuda in his 20s. I still have it.
David Crosby
#64. I used to go around the country performing. I was in my 20s; I had no fear. But then I had a baby, and all of sudden, your life, your world changes; you change.
Jaime Pressly
#65. The difference between rearing a child in your 20s and one in your 50s is one of patience.
Iman
#66. When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people.
Tom Hughes
#67. When you get to your mid-20s, you start to feel responsibilities for the things that you do and the people around you. It's a cool age.
Eliza Dushku
#68. When I was in my 20s I wasn't sure of myself. Now I can really stretch. I don't have to stay in the box. At this point I can say to myself, So what if I fall, so what? I'm going to get back up.
Jennifer Lopez
#69. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be tough. I discovered that I didn't want to be the woman I was raised to be - a good, traditional wife. When I went out in the world to find a husband, I found that husbands weren't ready to accept the kind of woman I was going to be.
Angeles Mastretta
#70. The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?'
Ariel Gore
#71. I was blessed in the sense that I got handed so much early on in life. I got a lot of the things people go through their 20s and 30s craving.
Sheena Easton
#72. Thirty was a big deal for me. It was the age where I reevaluated everything - how I approached life and how I thought about myself. When I look at my 20s, or when I look at any period in my life, I think about how much time I've wasted trying to find the right man.
Amy Adams
#73. Here I found myself in my early 20s, at the height of my career, up against something I was totally powerless against. I had enemies I had never heard of because of this. I certainly didn't have needles hanging out of my arms, nor did I smoke anything.
Irene Cara
#74. I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
Maya Lin
#75. I think the first half of my 20s I felt I had to achieve, achieve, achieve. A lot of men do this. I'm looking around now and I'm like, Where am I running?
Justin Timberlake
#76. When I was a young woman, before I moved to New York, working in small, non-Equity theatres in the Midwest, I did a lot of musicals in my early to mid-20s.
Jayne Houdyshell
#77. What I was being told in my 20s in the close-quartered, male-ego-infused work space, was that I had to stop reacting with my emotions to sexual desire towards me. The change, in other words, had to be made in me.
Cris Mazza
#78. In your mid-20s, you think you'll go on for eternity. Then a point comes where you realise that's not going to be the case.
Brian O'Driscoll
#79. I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.
Karen Russell
#80. In my 20s because I was working on films so much and travelling so much and doing press, I was single with no kids and I think that's the time when not only are you trying on looks, but you're trying on personalities - you're still really forming.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#81. I always wanted to be a surgeon, because I had a lot of admiration for my father, who is also a surgeon. I also wanted to be a heart surgeon. That was motivated by the fact that my young aunt, a sister of my dad, died in her early 20s of a correctable heart disease.
Magdi Yacoub
#82. I always wanted to see what America was like. I had that curiosity in my 20s when I was working in the theatre here [ in London] ... there was the mystery of LA and I wondered what happened over there. I wanted to go and check it out and I'm pleased that I have.
Tom Hiddleston
#83. When you're in your 20s, there's maybe a little room for you to not be at the top of your artistic game, if you look good on a magazine cover. When you're not on the cover of the magazines anymore, then you realize that the work has to be great.
Tori Amos
#84. I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.
Irv Kupcinet
#85. I enjoyed my 20s - they were torturous and beautiful. I learned so much about myself and about life and about the nature of people.
Craig Sheffer
#86. Fashion does seem to have a '20s comeback every few seasons, and I completely see why. It's a very feminine look: the fabrics and the shapes are very pretty and distinctive.
Joanne Froggatt
#87. When you suddenly appear on the scene and you are the new face, everything centers on you. I experienced this in my mid-20s and I found it rather hard.
Jude Law
#88. In our youths, many of us suspected that being tied down to a partner and family might constrain us. But after 40, even that landscape starts to shift. Many singletons turn inward and start longing for the things so many of us longed to be free of in our 20s.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#89. And my life for the first - you know, when I was in my 20s and 30s, I had my career, and I traveled the world, I lived out of a suitcase. I stayed up until dawn. I did all of those things that were very exciting.
Cheryl Tiegs
#90. What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.
Ken Livingstone
#91. I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Michael Cunningham
#92. All I've done is work ... I arrived in Los Angeles in my early 20s and I've been pounding the pavement ever since.
Jeremy Piven
#93. It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#94. But the two of them together, broke my heart. Olympia and Peter, those scenes ... When they're kissing in their 20s and then kissing in their 70s, that's what it is. And they had never met five minutes before they shot those scenes.
Paul Reiser
#95. I kicked college nostalgia in my late 20s. As much as I loved college and treasure the memories, I no longer want to go back.
Josh Radnor
#96. I was in my mid 20s when email finally took off. Until then, the phone was my primary way of connecting with the people in my life.
Rainbow Rowell
#97. I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#98. I took a Groundlings class in my 20s, and I was terrible. They didn't even pass me to the next level.
Rashida Jones
#99. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#100. I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
Alan Furst
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