Dan DeCarlo Quotes

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 wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.

I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.

There aren't a lot of films about adolescents or quote-unquote coming-of-age films that are realistic nowadays.

I've realized that I will probably write about teenagers and that time in people's lives - I'll probably come back to it a lot.

When I did 'Fast Times,' I felt very close emotionally to the characters. I liked those characters because they all had to work, so they were dealing with adult problems even though they were very immature, and I could relate to that.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven, very different, I decided - and indeed it is.

When I did a study of all the coming-of-age movies that meant a lot to me, whether it was 'The Graduate' or 'Rebel Without a Cause' or 'Dead Poet's Society,' they all had that timeless feel. None of them were completely married to the details of their age. They felt timeless in their treatment of it. That's what made them resonate with me.

Adapting a Judy Blume book is something I really wanted to do, and you couldn't grow up in the '90s without knowing about 'Tiger Eyes' and reading it. It should've been assigned to all teenage girls.

I'd never really considered doing young-adult novels, but one of the things that a friend pointed out to me is that I've actually had a teenage character in almost every adult novel that I've written.

I designed 'Buffy' to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can't be loved. Because it's about adolescence, which is the most important thing people go through in their development, becoming an adult.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful.

I think there is a point in every teenager's life where they are forced to come into themselves.

With few exceptions, the publishing industry has come to a consensus: if a book has a young protagonist, and if its worldview is primarily interested in the questions that crop up when coming of age, then it's a young adult novel.

I feel like at 18, you're half of someone else, as opposed to all of yourself. You're still figuring yourself out.

I read Jilly Cooper when I was on the verge of just growing up and I was becoming a woman.

We all have to go through our own experiences of growing up.

I feel like we're always learning about ourselves, but at twelve, you're learning big things that shape your identity.

For me, there's a deeper genre appreciation for what a coming of age story can be about. To apply that to a superhero world, for me, that was very exciting.

I started writing my first book for young people when I was in college. I was only a couple of years out of my teens when I began; I felt closer to that experience than I did as an adult. But I've always been drawn to stories about young people.

There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.