Jeannie Mai Quotes

Never underestimate a child's ability to get into more trouble.

I was the kid who was drawing on tables or removing the legs of furniture.

I was a little troublemaker. Always trying to get in trouble, always mischief, like throwing rocks at cars when I was younger, all that kind of stuff.

It was magical growing up in New Jersey. My sister and I would go nuts in the basement and do full theater productions. We used a humidifier as a fog machine. It was over the top.

I remember one time in my junior year, in my art class, our teacher had us doing, like, finger paints, and I went and put a stripe on a girl's shirt, and it turned into a big paint fight. Paint all over the walls, all over everybody. It was pretty fun.

As a kid, I was mischievous, necessarily, but I always wanted to do adventurous stuff.

As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

I was not very well-behaved. I remember I was a discipline problem. I was a typical American male at twenty years old, and I was causing trouble whenever I could.

I always knew I wanted to create. I used to sit in my room for hours drawing and making things. I once got into trouble for cutting up my mother's lampshades to make a dress. I was three.

To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.

I was a wild, mischievous kid, and I had tremendous imagination. Any experience I had, I'd try to reenact it.

I wrote 'She's a Lady' on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones's TV show. Jones's manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don't have a pad of paper, I'll write on whatever is available. What's the difference? Paper is paper.

I like crafts that are made out of necessity because they're a little naive - you made it because you needed it.

I was a troublemaking kid.

I always had a pretty good knack for raising hell.

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

I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.

We go old-school during the summer, like swimming or setting up lemonade stands. I try to teach my kids to make their own fun.

When I was growing up, kids would go outside and play all day and invent things. And my brothers and I pretended our picnic table was a ship one summer. Our bikes were horses, and our trees were forts. We turned everything in the world into make-believe.

Imagination and invention go hand in hand. Remember how lack of resources was never a problem in childhood games? Shift a few pieces of furniture around the living room, and you have yourself a fort.

I remember doing my mosaics or being in my little hiding place behind the couch snooping. I'd get bored sometimes, of course, but I think that's good for a kid, because it forces you to be creative.

I drew a picture on the back of a calendar in pencil. In those days they used to give out free calendars, I had no art paper, so I took whatever else I could.

The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.

With each job that you're given an opportunity to do, you're asked to use new parts of yourself and to figure the play out with other tools that you perhaps didn't use with the last show.

When I was a kid, I could make music out of anything, whether it be a rubber band, a tin can. Whatever it was I made music out of it and so that was my knack.