Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Adolescence and early youth...the fires are burning fastest, right? And your energy level is highest. It demands...and rock is screaming type music.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

The Hispanic population in this country is not a monolith. When you're in Miami, the newscast is going to be different from the newscast in Los Angeles.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

I remember in seventh grade we used to wear lipstick to school, and the teachers would get so angry, and they'd steal our lipstick if we had them.

When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, by the time you were 16, you were kind of expected to be an adult. By the time we were 16 and able to drive, certainly by 17 or 18 and into college, you just had very little interaction with your parents.

Anybody who has a problem with 'Skins' obviously doesn't understand teenage life.

Teens are the target demographic for everything in pop culture.

In high school I definitely had a clique of friends. And what I loved about it was that we were healthy and good girls.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

When I was growing up, rock & roll helped give me my sense of identity, but I had to search for it.

Girls are losing their virginity at 15, 16. I'm not promoting that. But my songs are talking... about me becoming a man.

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

I loved experimenting with eyeshadow and lip gloss in my tween years.

You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.

I remember being 12 or 13 and reading 'Seventeen' and 'CosmoGirl.' They were all about self-improvement.

When I talk to people who have teenagers now, their rooms are filled with screens. There are their phones and their DVD players and TVs and all these things to produce distractions for them, and I think it would be hard to find the time to create something. I think that's really changing something about adolescence.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence

Other people have suggested that I write about teens because I'm perpetually stuck in that stage of my own development. That could very well be true. I would throw out that teens and tweens are just absolutely fabulous and the most interesting people on the planet. And it is a time of high drama, and everything matters.

Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing.

Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know.

I'm just a regular 16 year old kid. I make good grilled cheese and I like girls.

I don't know what age the people who review my concerts reached puberty, I don't know if people in America reach puberty a lot later than they do in England or something like that, but the majority of those people are in their late teens and early twenties.