William Shakespeare Quotes

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

At the age of 14, I ran away from home for four days and hitchhiked around western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio.

That’s why these kids get into so much trouble. They don’t have anything to do.

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.

I experimented with drugs and I experimented with everything that little boys do - vandalism, throwing eggs at cars, breaking and entering schools and destroying a room. But I finally got to a point where I looked around and said, "This is not getting me anywhere. I'm stagnating with these guys." They were getting drunk and high every weekend. I got out.

I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she's a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.

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

The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes - naturally, no one wants to live any other way.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

If youth is a fault, it is one that one gets rid of soon enough.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.

I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.

After I reached my teens I decided I didn't want to hang out with anyone. I couldn't handle the stupidity.

If a body catch a body coming through the rye.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

People do horrible things when they're young. There might be betrayal and there might be things that should be forgotten.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug.

You had to grow up sometime. The fellows who grew early, they were in jeopardy. They became the cops and the crooks, and the crooks became the gangsters. The crooks became the Al Capones.

And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through.