Sam Levinson Quotes

During my 'difficult teens,' I read about worlds that were mysterious.

For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.

When I was a teenager, I felt my life was constrained by rules, school, my parents. I wanted to feel like I was empowered and different; that's why superheroes, comics, manga, and video games filled my needs. When I got older, I realized power is not free; it comes with responsibility.

I was very dreamy. Insular. I'm always amazed I survived adolescence at all and wasn't squashed flat by a juggernaut. Gaping, I think was my main skill. Staring out of the window.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

Sixteen is a hard time. A lot of kids are experimenting with things.

It was a very idyllic childhood, surrounded by utterly beautiful landscapes that I got very, very bored of when I hit my teens. But being on your own a lot and being bored is good for your imagination. It makes it stretch.

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.

Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.

For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to.

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.

It's embarrassing to go through any rebellious stage in front of people that you love and respect, and yet I'm glad I did.

I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

High school is such an awkward, difficult time, and I think a lot of people can't wait to explore the world because it's such a bubble.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

Adapting a Judy Blume book is something I really wanted to do, and you couldn't grow up in the '90s without knowing about 'Tiger Eyes' and reading it. It should've been assigned to all teenage girls.

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.

Any book that can help you survive the slings and arrows of adolescence is a book to love for life; 'The Catcher in the Rye' did just that, and I still do love it.

In a lot of ways, I wasn't a normal teenager.

I'd say I'm drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It's been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

I love coming of age stories that have struggle.

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism.