Ken Marino Quotes

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.

Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.

When you're 15, you're not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting - not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.

I just wanted to do something about the teenage experience; it's such a wonderful and horrible time of life.

My high school experience - and I think a lot of people feel this way - was complicated and intense, and I learned a lot about female relationships during that time.

I think you do a lot of your growing as a human being between the ages of 13 and 18.

I know it's hard to believe that I'm no longer the young 'Zuri' everyone has grown to love, which I truly appreciate, but like every young lady, I'm growing, I'm maturing and finding myself at 16 years old discovering the joys and pains of the world we live in.

I feel like we're always learning about ourselves, but at twelve, you're learning big things that shape your identity.

I enjoyed being a teenager.

Coming-of-age stories in high school are exciting because everything that happens during that time is very heightened.

I think everyone has their awkward phases. Growing up isn't easy for everyone.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

I was a shy kid, a late bloomer. At 22, I was probably 16 emotionally.

Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passions - art, music, sports, what have you.

But I think that your entire life is a process of sorting out some of those early messages that you got.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

I don't think men figure out what they're really about until they're 25. That's when they start to feel like themselves.

I was obsessed with girls when I was 13 years old; I wasn't really into books.

I feel like I've come out of this grown up, maybe because I live through the character vicariously and she grows up so much during the course of this story.

I learned by example. ...As a kid you think you are just the same as other adults.

Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends - I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.