Justin Halpern Quotes

Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I've always been that way, and I've always written stuff down.

I think every teenager goes through their angst. People who are like, 'No, I had a perfect adolescence,' make me wonder how that is possible.

When you're an adolescent, you suddenly wake up one morning and your body is an enemy. There are hormonal changes, physical changes, emotional changes. People are saying to you, 'Now you have to make the decisions that define the rest of your life.' The X-Men takes those elements and pushes them one giant step farther.

When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.

In the early 2000s, I was going through a lot. I didn't have my head screwed on right. Where I was at as a man, I was still growing up.

I used to love writing in my journal.

Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.

[About being a teenager] Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time.

I'm glad I went through all the normal teenage dramas that a lot of people go through. I can really relate to 'Secret Life' because I witnessed those similar struggles.

Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adult.

No one in the group was really growing up besides me, which is pretty weird 'cause there was no one in that group more self-destructive than I was.

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

I wasn't a very academic kid, and music was the way for all that feeling and angst and sex and love and anger to be channelled.

When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.

No matter where you are or where you grow up, you always go through the same awkward moments of being a teenager and growing up and trying to figure out who you are.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

'The Catcher in the Rye.' When I was a teenager, that was my book; yes, somebody gets it, somebody gets adolescence.

I've suffered from an identity crisis my entire life. It's why I went into acting.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

I've always written down how I feel.

I'd say I'm drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It's been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty.