Gilbert Hernandez Quotes

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 love telling teen stories where the characters are experiencing things for the first time - the stakes feel really high.

I'm interested in youth culture - when your parents are running your life, but you think you're the big man - but I'm not trying to make a statement.

Sixteen is a hard time. A lot of kids are experimenting with things.

I really never thought about the way I looked until boys came into the picture.

I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.

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

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

Everybody remembers what it's like to be in high school. We really never leave those years behind.

Just because you have teenagers in a movie doesn't make it a teen movie.

But, on another level it's really sort of this really cool coming of age story, it reminds me of like The Breakfast Club or something like that, if I can be so bold to associate with The Breakfast Club.

Very intense first summer out, to be 18 years old and never having gone on a date, never having smoked a cigarette, never had a drink, even a sip of beer, never kissed a girl, all of those things. It made for a fairly intense first year out.

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what 'The Big Steal' and 'Spotswood' were about. But I guess that's the impression I left on people.

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

I don't know what 15-year-old doesn't have a desire to separate themselves from their parents and prove their independence.

During and shortly after puberty human beings have an indubitable tendency to loosen their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture

Whether it's 1970, 1990, or 2010, kids will be going through the same experiences.

I think most girls have that moment when boys they've known their whole life see them in a different way.

Falling head over heels in love with women was a habit I thought I'd thoroughly grown out of in middle school, when a group of about five girls and I color-coordinated our outfits and spent weekends and even some weeknights sprawled out in each others bedrooms.

I just wanted to do the things that all normal teenagers wanted to do. So I did become quite rebellious.

Every teenager feels like a freak. It's part of being a teenager, part of the individuation from child to adult - those teenage years are who am I? What am I? Where am I going?

I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.

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 think when you are 17 you are very innocent.