When you're young, oddly enough, you're more afraid, more conservative about what it is you have.
As a 17-year-old, I remember positively dreading dance sequences. I would come to shoots, quaking with nervousness at the idea of making other artistes do retakes due to my mistakes.
I am often disgusted at hearing young people I know, declare that they are afraid of doing this or that, because they MIGHT be killed.
So scared of getting older, I'm only good at being young.
At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.
You should have seen me at 14, with braces and glasses, gangly and doing ballet!
Like all girls, when I was growing up, I always worried about this bit of me being too fat or that bit. But I look back at pictures of me when I was young, and I was thin and gorgeous.
When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.
You have to understand, when you're 15 and you're doing this Steven Spielberg movie with megastars - Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts - you know you want to be cool. I don't know how cool I'm going to look with my belly button out!
When you're young, you're very insecure. And if I could learn, if I could revisit my own past I could say to myself, don't think too much, just get on and do it.
I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine.
From a young age, I've had a desire to put forward this perfect image, whatever perfect was.
When I was younger, I used to power dress - I'd wear black and grey and suits all the time, to make it feel like I belonged.
When I look in the mirror I see the girl I was when I was growing up, with braces, crooked teeth, a baby face and a skinny body.
If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.
The very fact that the youthful soul feels insecure strengthens its active aspiration to master its insecurity.
It's easy to say standup for yourself. The problem is if you don't feel like you're physically capable of handling the repercussions of that, especially at a young age, it's hard to do that.
When you’re young, whatever you do that makes you stand out is a frightening thing. You learn later that that’s what you want to do, stand out.
At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn.
I used to look so immature, like a young man without self-confidence. There was one particular light blue, shiny cape outfit I wore that still makes me cringe.
I don't think I've been shy in the past. Young and uncomfortable, maybe. But shy? It has become this annoying term that I've been lumbered with.
