Stephen Karam Quotes

I was going to middle school in Berkley, and I did not fit in at all. Like a lot of kids, I found theater to be a good place for me.

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.

When I was a kid, dealing with trying to discover myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't have any Internet and didn't have any friends. You felt very alone and very frightened.

I guess I had that insecurity of missing out on the normal things that everybody else does. With all the traveling I was doing I felt I was leaving something behind.

We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.

For me, when I grew up, I never really had an outlet when it came to my social surroundings. Even if I had a form of popularity, I felt like I was very limited.

I lived at home and found myself really, really lonely because all my friends were enjoying college and partying, and I didn't have that.

Growing up in the '80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.

Everyone has self-esteem issues when they are a teenager, but I think you have to accept who you are, because otherwise you are going to have a really unhappy life.

You can be in the league and still feel like you're not in the league. That was the point I was at when I left Toronto.

'Welcome to the Dollhouse' is great. Even though it's about a girl in middle school, to me, that feels like the most honest reflection of what being a kid around that age feels like.

When I first saw 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High,' I thought: That's what my life is like. That's my day-to-day.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

There's certainly a loss of connection with folks on the ground who I care for and love and I want to spend time with.

I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I didn't really have the personal agency to express it.

First and foremost, 'Call Me by Your Name' is a story about love, and first loves, and unrequited, and then, later, requited love.

At school, I was basically a loner, it was hard until I was 15 or so. Then I went to art school and was gifted with freedom to do the things I really wanted to do.

I definitely spent a lot of high school isolating myself because I didn't feel like I fit in. I learned how to be funny.

I like books that explore identity and youth culture or rites of passage.

I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.

Elektra met Matt, and she fell in love with him. And I think he brought some good out of her at some point in her life, and maybe she wants to figure out, by coming back to him, who she really is. She comes back because she misses him, and she's alone, and the only person she's ever loved is Matt.

YA, I feel, is so accurate to what it is like be a teenager and the realities of being a teenager and being in love.

It's hard to be a teenager. It's lonely, and you feel like no one understands you. I think that's natural, and my mother let me have the space to feel that way.

I was sometimes a bit lonely as a teenager. There was a cultural disconnect.