Sarah Dessen Quotes

I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.

I mean, 15 - that is such a pivotal time in a young man's life.

My whole life, as an adult as well, I've been attracted to stories about young people. This period of time is so fertile - there's a million things that are happening, a million firsts, and to be able to witness that and record that is a privilege.

What I love about my daughter is that she is going to definitely allow me and force me to change my life and slow down and make it more about the real things in the world.

I spent 2010-2012 in Stockholm, trying to figure things out. I caught up on life! At the end of 2012, the relationship I was in ended, and I took the first plane to L.A. where my Swedish label has been setting up base. I felt so much more inspired to write and record than I had ever been, and the songs just started coming.

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42.

Sixty felt like a big landmark. Not in a dreadful sense, but none of the other birthdays have bothered me. It's got labels on it - OAP, retirement - and I just wanted to take stock. I wanted to be in my greenhouse at home and at least give myself the opportunity of not working again.

I'm only interested in rites of passage stories.

I had a breakthrough, I think my life just became calmer, I gave up drinking. My priorities changed as I had a young daughter. The group didn't want me to record for the Think Tank album... so I took it as a sign to leave.

I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.

All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.

My life has gotten so much better since I turned 40.

For my 50th birthday, I got ahold of a new print of 'Saturday Night Fever.' I see it much more as a tough coming-of-age movie than as a disco story.

Many people come to reinvention when life changes around them, but people come in all different stripes. I'm oriented to change.

Now, twenty years old, I come out and I go back to Greenwich Village. Now, of course, I'm a wealthy man.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

The past 6 and a half years have been the most amazing years of my life. It's sad it has come to an end but Avril and I are still family and moving forward in the most positive way possible.

The growing-up-fast part weirdly happened between the ages of 15 and 22.

I think that after divorce, I took my life a little bit more seriously, because you have to face endings in a way that you maybe never - death in one thing, but an ending in your own chapter. It's so clearly placed there for you with divorce.

Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else - university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.

I always think that period between the ages of 18 and 24 is such a bizarre stage, and the two people at either end are always very different.

For anyone who's had a transition in their life - heading off to college, parents sending their kids off to college, people getting out of college and heading off into the workforce. Those are major transitions.

It's one huge arc right until you're in your early 20s. You're always changing and always learning, but it's very much that chapter in your life: fall crazy in love, become extremely angry at little things. It's a tumultuous time.

I can't imagine life without Vogue at this point. People say, what's changed? What's different But it's just part of growing up, meeting your soulmate and moving on with life.