Steve Aoki Quotes

Some would argue that you're as successful as the company you keep. Certainly there is a connection between our friends and who we are.

Music, especially as an adolescent, helps to build identity because that's when people start developing a sense of self. You can kind of tell based on what music a person listens to what kind of person they'll be pretty much for the rest of their life.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

Peers often matter more than parents.

Who you are depends on who you meet.

Different people bring out different aspects of ones personality.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

My childhood definitely revolved around my relationship with my brother. I wanted to be different. I wanted to find my way of being as intriguing and interesting as he was.

Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.

In '92 - '93, I was at that age when I was looking for my identity and that's when I found dance music and I really fell in love with it.

When I was growing up, rock & roll helped give me my sense of identity, but I had to search for it.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

I think when you're younger, you need to socialize and be with people your own age.

Glizzy Gang is a real movement. They had movements back when I was younger, in the '90s, but you don't really have a major movement in the 2000s.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

More than a few studies have shown that the five people you spend the most time with represent you - so you need to decide - who do you want to be?

We do become our conversations. We really will become our associations.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo.

When I was 19 or 20 and doing my thing, I can't sit here and say I had this strong political agenda - I was literally just being myself.

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

A lot of people get into alternative music as part of their identity. It's something that isn't the mainstream, that their brothers and sisters don't know about, and that their parents don't like. It's something they can have as their own.

Growing up in the mid-to-late '90s in London, you start seeing the explosion of drum'n'bass and then the birth of U.K. garage and grime. I decided to focus a lot of my energies as an aspiring MC. It was a very natural way to express yourself as a kid from a certain kind of neighborhood.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.