Nathan Chen Quotes

I want to be a skater.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to live in California because I liked skateboarding.

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.

Growing up in Huntington Beach, you were either a traditional sports athlete, a skateboarder, or a surfer. I got my first skateboard when I was five and skated off and on over the years, did a little BMX racing as a kid, and then in my freshman or sophomore year I started getting a little bit more into skateboarding.

This is something I've always wanted to do- to skate through a part of New York City that thousands of people ride through every week, feeling the energy of one of the original stomping grounds of street skating.

I'd like to consider myself a versatile skater and I like to skate to different kinds of music.

I'm healthy enough to still skate, so I gotta go because growing up I didn't have - I mean, I grew up in Montana so... there was kind of a little half-pipe in my yard, and that was the extent of the skate terrain in Montana. So I've got to go out and make up for lost time.

Some skaters, they live for skating, and they are home-schooled. I'm very lucky my parents let me go to school and have a normal life.

I'd like to cause a little riot in skating.

With 'Fantasy Factory,' I want to take skating beyond the Tony Hawk generation and represent the street-skating generation.

In Ohio, I built the world's first skate plaza.

I was into skateboarding, so through skating I kind of got into hip hop by discovering it through skate videos.

Once you pick up a skateboard, you'll find out that it's not a hobby, it's not a sport, it's a lifestyle.

We got skate parks in different states, but me skating? Nah, I'm too gangster; I can't rock with it. But I watch it.

Me and my friends had BMX magazines and skate magazines, and I was a photographer who made skate videos.

I was more interested in skating and the girls and traveling than I was in calculus.

When I started skating, it was such a small community. You didn't aspire to be rich or famous or make a career out of it because that wasn't something anyone had done yet.

Skating was popular, but it wasn't mainstream. It had this underground following, and you could go on tours, win decent prize money, and make royalties from signature products - that's how I came to buy a house when I was a senior in high school.

Honestly, the best skater that I've seen who raps is Tyler, The Creator. He really can skate... He's legit.

I'm a longboard guy.

I feel like skateboarding is as much of a sport as a lifestyle, and an art form, so there's so much that that transcends in terms of music, fashion, and entertainment.

I hung out with all the guys in my neighborhood when I was little... I would, like, skateboard and go to skate parks, like, every day and do motor cross, like, every weekend, and I was kind of one of those girls.

In Dogtown, skateboards are like bikes to the Chinese.

I've known Larry Clark since I was fourteen. I've always skateboarded in Manhattan. Larry got into the scene in the early '90s, taking pictures and skating with us.

In ramp skating, there's this guy Alex Perelson who's really coming into his own and doing some amazing new stuff we haven't seen before. Just different types of spin.