Mary Gaitskill Quotes

All my friends were off on gap years, so going to New York alone, at the age of 18, was kind of my flying the nest. It was an amazing experience.

I think in the experience of growing up and realizing who you are, what your place in the world is can be quite scary.

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

I was trying to learn how to deal with the freedom that I had away from home for the first time. 'Long Black Train,' the song and the album, are very special to me. It was just one of those things that I felt like God gave to me for a purpose, and I've been out here promoting that purpose.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

I started out myself rather late you see, I was 18.

When I was 17, I decided I was going to leave home.

I've never forgotten what it's like to be in your early twenties, which is not a particularly easy time. You've left your family, you've left the strictures of high school, and you're trying to break free and form yourself but you have to support yourself as well. We don't really give enough credence to that time of life and to its troubles.

I left home when I was 16 because I was looking for adventure.

Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It's the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer.

I think that the main thing that you can learn from watching 'The Spectacular Now' is just learning about growing up and moving on.

Everything about my teenage life was almost ideal.

'Catcher in the Rye' changed my life when I was a kid. I read it as I was a boy turning into a man, and I was so fascinated by the values. I believe in it.

I remember the kind of teenager I was, the kind of teenager I wanted to be, and then the kind of teenagers that were all around me. Life is lived on such a big scale in those years - and such an embarrassing one as well.

In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

Peter Parker's storyline hits every key point of growing up.

You grow up a certain way, and you make decisions within your family, but then you go to college, and the decisions become harder. You are away from home, from the influence of your parents, dealing with peer pressure. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in college.

By the time I was, you know, 16 years old, I had done a lot of growing up.

Peroxide' is a mix of everything I have experienced from the age of 15 until now with themes of break ups, first love, growing up - all the sorts of things that you experience at that age.

Real Madrid wanted me to join their academy. It was a big decision to move when I was 15. It's a key age for a youngster, and you're close to your friends and family. But I moved to Madrid, and my family stayed at home. It made me mature earlier than normal. That was a very big decision, and it changed me in a positive way.

I'd been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to 'Spider-Man: Homecoming.'

Like me as a teen - and like many teenagers now - my characters are at a peculiar crossroads in their lives. They desperately seek freedom. But at the same time, they are constantly thwarted.

I grew up just as my friends did until 19 before leaving home, and it's because of that I am who I am now.

I enjoyed being a teenager.

You go through so many changes, especially in your twenties.