Amy Heckerling Quotes

Like any other kid, I was trying so hard to fit in that school made no sense to me. I wasn't attending class; I was trying to hang out in the caf with the cool kids. I was always trying to be cool.

I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

In high school, I threw a party to get a guy's attention. I wanted him to think I was cool, so I let him and his friends DJ and basically take over the house.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

My first three years of high school, I wasn't that cool.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student, but I didn't care. I was getting the high fives and the low fives and the pats on the back. I was cool.

I think we all want to fit in at a young age.

In secondary school, I became aware of the idea of being cool, and that was a bit of a shell shock.

I knew in my heart that I wasn't cool, but I figured I could at least be cool by association.

I was never considered cool throughout my teens: a very important time to be accepted by someone, especially your peers. Yes, I had all the screaming women, but the guys hated my guts.

I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.

I think I was a pretty normal student; I just followed most of my friends.

Like most people, I have painful memories of trying to fit in as a child. I wore, said, and did pretty much what everyone else did.

I don't know if I was popular in high school. My school was actually not really clique-y, which was nice. I went to a very artsy school, so everyone was kind of friends with each other. I was trying to be popular more, like, in junior high and elementary school and dealt with all that backstabbing and drama.

I was very average in the social label scale going through school. I was neither the coolest person in school, nor did I suffer the slings and arrows of being made fun of to such a degree that I couldn't get through the day.

In my teens, I was never part of the cool crowd.

Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, 'Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.'

When I was young, running with a gang was a cool thing to do; that's how you get popular; that's how you get the girls.

I grew up being very shy, very much a bookworm, and I remember desperately wondering how to be accepted by the popular kids.

It is clear from all these data that the interests of teenagers are not focused around studies, and that scholastic achievement is at most of minor importance in giving status or prestige to an adolescent in the eyes of other adolescents.

See, at a certain point it becomes cool to be boy crazy. That happens in sixth grade, and it gives you so much social status, particularly in an all-girls school, if you can go up and talk to boys.

Like any other all-American boy, I wanted to be just thought of as popular, be well-liked, and meet a lot of cute girls.