Jeff Kinney Quotes

An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.

Dad worked his entire career as an aviation technician. Mom was a legal secretary who became a teacher. We lived a simple American life.

If I want to experience the life of an ordinary person, I cannot do it in Asia.

The simple answer is I'd just be a guy trying to feed my family, like everybody else. The complicated answer is, I think I'd be in some sort of military or government world of some sort.

My life is really quite conservative. I've been married nearly 50 years. I don't have hobbies or children. I don't much care to travel. I've never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.

I came from a very normal, un-Hollywood background. My parents provided me with every sort of normal upbringing that they could.

Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin.

I grew up with the white picket fence. My dad went to work nine to five, and he had a station wagon.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

My mother insisted that I have a normal upbringing.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

My mom grew up in Kansas, my dad in Indiana. They had boring childhoods.

I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in psychotics. I'm interested in the person you don't expect to have a story. I like Everyman.

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.

I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.

Can anyone seriously imagine a society without stable families? Maybe we should raise all the kids in state orphanages.

My family lives a pretty normal life.

I don't think I can tell any stories about how I lived in a van in Alaska. I grew up in the suburbs, I even had my own room. We weren't poor. Everything was very normal.

I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves.

The government uses words that make almost no sense to those of us in ordinary life.

It is an act of hubris to believe that marriage can be infinitely malleable, that it can be pushed and pulled around like silly-putty without destroying its essential stability and what it means to our society, and if marriage goes, then the family goes, and if the family goes, we have none of the decency or ordered liberty which Americans have been brought up to enjoy and to appreciate.

If you live only a movie-star life, you know only movie-star things. I needed to live a regular life with normal people around.

I didn't live in L.A. I lived in Oklahoma, and I liked to do normal things with normal people.

I am a low-key girl from a middle-class family of a small village.