Mika Quotes

I was always the class clown and got kicked out of class at least once a day for just being a goofball. Not suspended or anything, just sit outside and look at the tree on the bench. I got benched a lot. You keep one foot on the bench and try to get as far away as possible.

I was always one who was clowning around in school and getting in trouble.

I was a born troublemaker and might as well earn a living at it.

I wasn't ever a bad guy, and I was never arrested or anything like that, but I was a wild boy in many respects.

I was always getting in trouble for whispering in class.

I have this bookmark with glued-on macaroni. I made it in the fourth grade while in detention for giving a girl a tattoo using two rocks rubbed together and a stick.

When I was at school, I got into trouble quite often.

I was quite capable at school, but I spent a lot of time in detention.

I had run away from home three times. I had been kicked out of three different schools under different circumstances. I was kicked out of everything that I didn't quit. Kicked out of schools. Kicked out of summer camp, the Boy Scouts, the altar boys, the choir, and something else that I can't think of, that I'm proud of. Anyway, that was my pattern. I just began to invent myself early in life, and went out and did something about it.

I always wanted to be different and do things differently. I was a pain in the neck. I was challenging everything you wanted me to do and challenging people in school.

We let off a Dungbomb in the corridor and it upset him for some reason—" "So he hauled us off to his office and started threatening us with the usual—" "—detention—" "—disembowelment—

My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.

Pranks vs school = pranks win all day.

So are all the kids on the East Coast repeating school next year? Get ready to see a lot of hairy eighth graders. Storm brain drain.

In high school, people are sometimes encouraged to be like everyone else. What's so great about this show is that these kids are weird and different and over-achievers. They know what they want and they're going after it. They're weird and they don't deny it. That's what makes it special.

After I got out of law school and worked in a big law firm, I thought, there are so many kids like me, in my neighborhood, that could be here if they had more support from their families, better financial aid. But the gap is so wide once you miss that opportunity. So I was always interested in figuring out, How do you bridge that? I felt, as a lawyer, when I was mentoring and working with kids, that I gained a level of groundedness that I just couldn't get sitting on the forty-seventh floor of a fancy firm.

I’ve met kids who haven’t had the best of parents but because they had something in them, or they had somebody at school help develop them, they turned out fine.

I've been thrown out of schools and fired from jobs. I don't want to work. I can honestly say I haven't done an honest day's work in my life.

The only thing wrong with me was that I was a weirdo that hated school. I'm sure now there'd be a disorder for it, but I was just an oddball.

I never wanted to be a celebrity; I never wanted to be famous. And in my daily life, I work really hard to not trade on it in any way. I am so desperately worried about anybody saying, "She cut in line," or "She took our table," or "She doesn't do her own grocery shopping." It's not like it's hard to be decent and respectful and well behaved. I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school. But it almost doesn't matter to a certain segment of the populace.

I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too.

Children accept their world as the world. I grew up like kids that I went to school with. Their parents were either shrinks or actors.

Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you've never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it.

In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.

Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.