Richard Harris Barham Quotes

Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.

Mad World' hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on.

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

It seems that one moment I was this little kid only caring about animals and flowers and stuff, and then the next minute I was this raging stew of hormones. I don't know if you've ever been a raging stew of anything, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it.

I was a happy kid up until I hit the teen years.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.

I don't think it's very difficult to bring a virginal, angst-ridden, hip-hop grunting white boy to the screen. Not that I have any experience with that. I don't know man. I understood where his head was at, because he was this 18-year-old cat that thought he was a man, but didn't really know what it meant to be a man.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.

I'm so associated with being young and being with a teenager.

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.

Going through puberty as a young girl is so confusing. This monster invades your body, changes things and makes things grow, and no one tells you what's going on.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways.

I've been a teenager. I even feel like I've been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

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.

Puberty extends into your twenties, for sure, and some people don't get over that until much later in life. I feel like I'm just starting to get over puberty - basically twenty years of insufferable, totally self-obsessed hell.

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.

I've always enjoyed the teen angst thing. I had a lot of teen angst as I was growing up, so I think I have a lot to say about it through characters before I have to move on.

If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Adolescence isn't just about prom or wearing sparkly dresses.

Everyone, when you're a teenager and you're growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it's not.