Burt Reynolds Quotes

I grew up and still didn't know what it meant to be a man.

I became a man. Before that I was a little boy.

'Fringe' was the first time I realized that I could ever man up in a character and make this transition from being a boy or a young man into actually being a man.

If you look at films about becoming a man, coming-of-age movies are made with 12-, 16-, 40-, 50-year-olds... For a guy to feel like he's a 100 percent grown-up is almost like giving up. Like admitting that you're on your way into the grave.

If there was no war, the young men felt that they were denied manhood.

You don't become a real man until you're 35 or 40.

There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

May the Lord ordain that your son becomes a man, and never a coward!

We carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives. We get through the Car Crash Age alive and cruise through our early twenties as cool dudes, wily, dashing, winsome . . . shooting baskets, the breeze, the moon, and then we try to become caring men, good husbands, great fathers, good citizens.

Midnight passes and I'm twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

A boy becomes a man when a man is needed

There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.

In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

I think that it gave me a really strong feeling of my life force and a confidence in myself. I felt like I was a man. Before that point for some reason, I always felt I was a boy (laughter). In fact, they called me the baby on the ship 'cause I was the youngest guy on the ship. But I always felt that way.

A boy has two jobs. One is just being a boy. The other is growing up to be a man.

Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.

It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn't happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn't have thought about it much.

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd grown up

Childhood may do without a grand purpose, but manhood cannot.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it's patience.