Jeff Kinney Quotes

I am the most successful unsuccessful actor in New York. And I guess with that, maybe apparent only to myself, there started to be a very subtle but unmistakable whiff of entitlement, bitterness, jealousy. I was not respecting the work.

I had a period when I was sixteen where I started to get a big head. I was going through puberty, and I was nominated for an Academy Award. My head got inflated. My friends were the real ones who said, 'You're acting different.' But the truth is that I don't need that, because I don't get out of hand.

Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

I was going to middle school in Berkley, and I did not fit in at all. Like a lot of kids, I found theater to be a good place for me.

I went through a lot in middle school, and you always try so many different looks and try to be so many different people. I finally realized I'm awkward, I'm lanky, and I'm going to embrace it - make fun of myself and just laugh.

'The bigtime for you is just around the corner.' They told me that first in 1952 - boy, it's been a long corner. If I don't hit the bigtime in the next 25 or 30 years, I'm gonna pack in the music business and become a full-time gigolo.

You've got to have an ego as big as Mars to want to think that you, of all people, are better than anyone else to be president of the United States. People that vain, they want their place in history, and they want to be able to control how much they'll be worshipped by future generations.

I used to get really jealous of Ron Howard as Opie on 'The Andy Griffith Show' - we were the same age. I would just think, 'God, that little kid can work, and I can't!'

I don't think stardom will ever go to my head.

Think about what makes a band burn out. They get too successful too fast. And then they take it for granted. And they get entitled. And they get picky. We don't ever allow ourselves that possibility.

You don't want to be that big shot, some guy who's some... whatever.

I came out of my mother's womb wanting to be a professional wrestler. But then notoriety and stardom happened, and I started getting cocky.

I'd never want to get too big for my boots.

It truly is a little intimidating to go speak at a middle school. Sure, on one hand the kids are only around 13 years old, but on the other hand, merely going back there reactivates the dorky, miserable feeling of being that age again. It isn't easy. As soon as I arrived I could almost feel the braces on my teeth, the don't-look-at-me slouch of my shoulders, the feathered wings of my bangs.

There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.

Middle school's amazing. It is extraordinary. An extraordinary time.

The one thing I would like to get across about my whole feeling regarding high school is how I was when I was fifteen. Gawky. Always a hem hanging down, or strap loose, or a pimple on my chin. I never knew what to do with my hair. I was a mess. And I still carry that fifteen-year-old girl around now. A piece of me still believes I'm the girl nobody dances with.

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.

Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.

High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life - those people are liars... Who wants the best years of their life to be in *high school*? High school is something *everybody* should be ready to lose.

I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule and someday I'll try to get around to it.

Usually the bullies are the most insecure. I was bullied and it's hard, you feel like high schools never going to be over. Its four years of your life and you just have to remember the person picking on you has their own problems and their own issues. And you're going to be ok.

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.