My father always worked away, and died when I was 17, but I hated him by that point. It hit me later in life, but back then I was teenage and angry.
‘Fast Times At Ridgemont High’ is one of my favorite movies; it’s a film that’s a human comedy, it’s a drama, and the characters all, in a way, fit the teenage archetypes, but they don’t become stereotypes because each of the actors brought their own presence and their own personality to the screen.
I remembered that my grandfather had spent his teenage years in Shanghai and that he went back after he finished medical school to work there in a hospital. So I went back into my family archives and was able to find out his exact address; it was a street that was in the French Concession.
As a teenage fisherman, I watched and followed terns to find fish. Later, I studied terns for my Ph.D.
I missed out on my teenage years. I led a sheltered life. I was practicing scales instead of playing football.
The one thing I really lucked out on is that all through my teenage years, when my sister was a lifeguard and everyone I knew was out in the sun all day – I was in the theater. Everyone called me Casper because I never had a tan, and everyone else was tan all the time. I think that was the luckiest thing of my life.
‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’ was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It’s based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
When I was a kid, people bullied me about my weight and being skinny. Throughout my teenage years, I had to just depend on the fact that, look, this is who God created me to be, so I’m going to depend on what’s already there.
I think more people are going to continue reading YA as well as reading other books because they have learned that they can find books there which they will truly love: a teenage protagonist is close enough to adult so readers of whichever age can sympathise and empathise with them.
When I’m with my friends’ teenage children, I always say, ‘Are your friends having sex yet?’
Every time I turn on the TV, it infuriates me. You’ll see an ad for Advil or Viagra and hear some monotonous voice warn you about even the smaller side effects like headaches or nausea. When you see a tampon commercial, it’s all happy teenage girls running along the beach in bikinis. The dangers are beyond minimized.
My aunt made stuff; my mom was creative, so I was surrounded by that. When I moved to England, it was ’75, and everything was happening. My whole teenage life is England, glam rock and David Bowie and Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop, all that stuff.
I got to do school properly and all the stuff that you should do when you’re young and teenage: first friends, first girlfriends. It wasn’t like I needed to be doing acting.
I can’t believe, even in ‘The Guardian,’ people ask the questions, ‘Where did ISIS come from?’ ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?’ Maybe because we’ve been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.
I really love ‘Hairspray.’ I love the idea of this teenage dance show where you have to go through all these competitions to get to the next level.
One of the saddest things I’ve ever done is download ‘I’m A Teenage Dirtbag’ by Wheatus and play along with it with my headphones on. Oh, God. If you were to walk in and see me do that, you would really worry for me.
Sorry, I love the internet. Since I got my cats, I don’t look at clips so much. Like a teenage boy with a real live girlfriend. But I am always sucked into clips of unlikely animal friendships.
I don’t really have time or interest in doing a lot of the crazy things that some of my teenage peers do, mostly because I have such a hectic life that I don’t need to add to that chaos by creating my own teenage drama like a lot of teenagers do.
It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.
Often when you’re a teenage girl, you get sent characters that are so unenjoyable and unexciting.
Men fill up their heads and drawers and sheds with stuff from their teenage years.
I’ve dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.
Everyone has strange teenage years. It’s not like I can claim some particularly unique set of high school horrors. I think I was just an awkward kid who never felt comfortable in his own skin. I think I was alone a lot by circumstance and then by choice.
I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I’m allowed to write about it; it’s mine.
I had had my own trials and tribulations with body image. I had gone through a lot starting from my teenage years.
I always joke deep down I’m really a teenage girl on the inside.
In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.
When I spoke to pupils at Sydenham School in London, I was shocked and saddened to hear some of the teenage girls say they felt pursuing a career in television was not even worth the effort as a Black woman.
I always find myself gravitating toward stories of transformation, and one of those periods is teenage life. When teenagers are figuring out who they are and have one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood – I think that’s a really mythic moment to tell stories about.
No one escapes the teenage years without a lot of challenges. I had many. I was awkward. Petrified of boys.
I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.
When Ke$ha tries to rap like L’Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she’s the star. Ke$ha’s greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
When I was young, there weren’t any teenage girls I could relate to in film. They were all put in boxes: the virginal good girl, the really sarcastic asexual one. I wanted to do something that represented how I felt then.
I’ve been very surprised by people asking me what my teenage experience was like.
Ask any teenage girl to describe her perfect bedroom, and you’ll get answers like ‘a room with a private phone line, a place to hang out with friends, and for it to be way-cool and funky.’ Ask parents the same question, and ‘a locked door that opens on their 21st birthday’ might top the list!
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
I was obsessed with the Turtles, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There’s Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and my dad used to call me Callemundo, saying you’re the fifth turtle.
I was 12 when my father passed, so I didn’t have a father during my teenage years.
Everyone just talks about the problems our teenage girls are facing and what they’re dealing with. But there was, to me, a void in how they were being served or helped. I thought, ‘Wow, I’d love to create something.’
I have 5 teenage daughters, and I learned the hard way – it’s difficult to talk to any person under the age of 25 without the presence of a cell phone.
My bedroom was plastered with pictures of Van Damme. My mother was worried about me. Most teenage boys have half-naked women on their walls, and I had Jean-Claude.
I am rather in favour of dealing with teenage hooliganism.
I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don’t see someone who looks like their mother.
When you have three teenage girls, and you’re married 21 years, and have a mother who’s blind in one eye and has dementia who lives with you, and your dad has worse dementia, and you’re into metal, and your wife is born again, you’re never running out of material.
The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.
I’ve always had a teenage thread running through my music.
Teenage girls have so much sway over culture, yet people sneer at the things that women and girls love, and are contemptuous of the creators of that content, particularly if they are women.
I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night – the worst kind of teenage alienation.
My parents constantly tried to talk me out of being an artist. They had gone through the whole journey with my sister and just wanted me to have a normal teenage life.
When you come from a family of communists and you go through your teenage rebellion, what’s the best way of rebelling from a family of communists? Well, I put on a suit and tie and became a capitalist… There was nothing I could do to upset my family more than that.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That’s where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
