will.i.am Quotes

We forget when we're all grown up. 16 was a long time ago. It's hard to remember how freakin' difficult it is as 16! Life is not easy, and you're trying to figure stuff out.

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.

A flapper is just a little girl trying to grow up - in the process of growing up.

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.

Just because I do what I do doesn't mean I escaped adolescence, all the bumps and bruises that go along with it.

The first album was a coming-of-age album - I don't like the phrase, but when you listen to it, you can tell I was having a hard time, that I wasn't socially relating to people.

When you come out of your teens, you think you're sussed. But you don't know who you are at 22. You're constantly trying to fit in. You get a little lost.

Kids don't shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.

I was really young when I was working on 'Freaks and Geeks.' In a lot of ways, that was the experience that informed a lot of what I've become, and I feel like every experience I have is in some way or another an extension of something that started there.

I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.

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.

I didn't have a teen age at all. I didn't even look at boys, never mind... then suddenly it was like, 'Oh my god!' So I made up for a lot of lost time very quickly. It was kind of bonkers. Working hard, partying hard - but also experiencing life, you know.

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

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

I think I've been lucky enough to have had an extended adolescence. I'm a lot like I was when I was 15.

I love coming of age stories that have struggle.

I love teenagers. I loved being a teenager.

I've been very surprised by people asking me what my teenage experience was like.

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

I designed 'Buffy' to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can't be loved. Because it's about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult.

There aren't a lot of films about adolescents or quote-unquote coming-of-age films that are realistic nowadays.

I think there is a point in every teenager's life where they are forced to come into themselves.

When you're growing up, you realize you've got a lot of heavy things on your shoulders.

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.