Laura van den Berg Quotes

I just decided I wanted to become someone else... So I became someone else.

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.

I'm very loyal to my south fans and the industry there. So, it's hard for me leave all the love, respect, and admiration and shift base here. I'm a Mumbai girl and have lived here for most of my life. At the same time, I've spent 10 years of my life in the South and feel like a south Indian at heart.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

I once was the walrus, now I'm John.

When I was in L.A., I thought I would never leave.

I had really bad grades in high school and didn't want to go to college, and my dad said, 'Why don't you move to L.A. or New York and pursue music? You've always been good at it.' It was the first thing that made sense to me and... It was the right move.

I struggle to see myself as Tyrone Mings the Ipswich footballer. I'm just Tyrone from Chippenham.

I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.

I moved away when I was 17. It's been a mad journey, but I've met and made some incredible friends.

If my 20s were a time when the way I looked was my calling card, then it feels as though my 60s will be a reinvention.

For a lot of people, I will always be the mall girl, and that's OK. That was my start. But I can do so much more than that.

Going to Charlotte and being there two years, I missed L.A., but it was good for me.

I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.

I had an Arabic background. but I lived a very scattered childhood. I didn't belong to any one culture, which meant I didn't have musical geographies in my head.

But I miss the woman I was, even as I learn to accept the new creature I’ve become.

Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.

I am not who I was, but I know who I am.

I am no longer Tris, the selfless, or Tris, the brave. I suppose that now, I must become more than either.

When you come out to L.A. to make movies or to do this kind of work, everybody is coming out on their own and you leave your tribe behind. Then, it's a question of, that was your tribe by blood, and now, what is the tribe that you're making by choice or by what you think is important? I think we were having that experience, so somehow the cult world seemed really compelling.

I’m trying to get away from roles. I used to identify myself strictly in terms of my role, but when your roles fall away, part of you falls with them.

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

i can become a new woman every day until i like the woman i become, then i can become her for a while, if not forever!

I used to be someone.

I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am - what shall I say I am today?