Quotes about Personal Growth

I will always be my hardest critic. Nobody else will ever be able to come at something I do harder than I come at myself.

The chips fall into place, but the educational experience I had at Cal, second to none.

I was never interested in writing a 'Mommie Dearest,' getting even with Mia - none of that.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

You are not, nor ever will be, better than anyone else besides the person you are now.

When I left home, I was a very normal kid with no insecurities or issues, but that was just the beginning.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.

I'm a small and normal girl, and stories like mine no one likes to tell. Fortunately so, because I wouldn't like to play myself.

Normal people go through breakups.

I started acting when I was young, and I didn't go to drama school. It was always something that I did alongside going to school and being a normal person.

As a human, yeah, it's awesome. You grow up and you are in Little League, and you want to make the all-star team; you go to college, and you want to make the all-star team. So any normal person would want to do it on the biggest stage and highest level. And I'm a normal person. I haven't changed there.

At first it was a bit daunting, but once I started to do it, the more I got into it, the more I started enjoying it and being able to say things lyrically that I would normally have to say musically.

Normally I don't race other people; I challenge the environment and my own limitations.

I went to the UAE aged 28, which normally doesn't make sense to go at that age.

My hometown, Backa Topola, was in the north of the country near the Hungarian border. It is a nice part of Serbia, and I am very happy I grew up there.

I left home at 15 to go to the North Carolina School of the Arts.

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 don't want to be a slave to nostalgia.

I'm not into nostalgia, and I only look back to find lessons.

I started coming into my own at 30, discovering what's important to me, not caring what other people think.

It's like, 'You're not allowed to change. That's not fair. We like you like this.' But I don't. So let me expand and express myself.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

I think that from 15 to, like, 18, I went through a very rough time. Something basically everyone goes through in those years - not knowing what you're going to do.

Every race is not perfect; there are obviously a lot of things I can improve on at the end of the race.