Jay Asher Quotes

We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.

It has always been very important to look carefully at young people and the way they wear clothes.

Teenagers are asking, 'Who am I?' and 'How do I fit in?' in every aspect of their lives, and the best YA romances appreciate that there is more to a teen's life than finding love.

'True School' is one great big reminder. It's a reminder to everybody in that middle school bracket that was in school when playing hard to get was out.

The kids today, they think they can dance with their faces.

I noticed that no matter where I went in the country, there was this group of questions that got asked. I would track them and keep them in categories. Like body image, school, family, friendship, you name it, the emotional life of a teenage girl.

My biggest crisis is that I don't understand what young people like.

These kids today, everything is about hitting a vocal home run.

There can be a lot of pressure on girls to dress the way they wouldn't normally dress: on social media, at school, among friends.

I'm interested in youth culture and popular culture.

I won't allow magazines in the house. When I was younger, I wanted to have my hair cut like so-and-so in the class above me at school, not somebody in a magazine. You see young girls trying to dress like so-and-so because they've seen lots of pictures of them.

I just have a problem with youth culture.

I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.

When you're younger, it's all about conformity and being easily influenced - especially in terms of fashion. You just follow the trends. Whatever is hot at the moment, you want to get it. You basically just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. But as you get older, those things aren't as important.

There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'

The thing that I find interesting about teens now is that no matter how desperate we seem to be taxonomically 'othering' them, for one reason or another - because the Internet, because whatever - I feel like a lot of the benchmarks and the experiences are, you know, same for teens through time immemorial.

It's cool for young guys to see what their idols are doing.

It used to be radio was the place that young people gathered to get their information.

As a 15-year-old teenage girl, I can attest to the fact that boys dominate most conversations between girls my age.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

I just wanted to do something about the teenage experience; it's such a wonderful and horrible time of life.

All my friends started getting boyfriends, but I didn't want a boyfriend, I wanted a thirteen-colour biro.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Teenagers are kinda the same wherever you find them in America.