I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street.

My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

Premature burial works just fine as a cure for adolescence.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.

Even as kids reach adolescence, they need more than ever for us to watch over them. Adolescence is not about letting go. It's about hanging on during a very bumpy ride.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Adolescence as the time when an individual 'recapitulates' the savage stage of the race's past.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

I'm quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

Adolescence isn't just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.

The conflict between the need to belong to a group and the need to be seen as unique and individual is the dominant struggle of adolescence.

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Head Start graduates are more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to need special education, repeat a grade, or commit crimes in adolescence.

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

'The Catcher in the Rye.' When I was a teenager, that was my book; yes, somebody gets it, somebody gets adolescence.