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No 17-year-old is just one thing, especially in this day and age. Kids are into all sorts of things.

There's so many companies that are spending so much money on 17-year-olds... I can't compete with that. I'm not that guy anymore, they can't dress me up and roll me out there and make me look good. I am what I am!

I wasn't a perfect thing at 17. I didn't have confidence. I was hunched over and real embarrassed, and I didn't want to be in the limelight. But it changed over time.

I think it's unreasonable to expect kids at 17 to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives. And actually, I guess I had a desire to be an artist, and I did enroll in art school out of high school.

Fifteen is such a weird age to be. Nobody treats you like an adult, but you desperately want to be one. You still have these childlike aspects, but you're just kind of coming into the world.

Don't try too hard to be young. Be who you are.

So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday, and you're 17 years old.

Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity.

Youth is really in your attitude, not in what you look like.