Sarah Dessen Quotes

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

Just being young and growing up in this business is hard. Just growing up in general is hard.

My mother and father have also raised five boys so they know there's only so much that can be controlled.

Fathers like to have children good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable, but how to put them in that desirable condition is out of their philosophy.

I have four kids; three girls and a boy. The oldest girl is 13, and has her own social life now, so there's a bit of begrudging cooperation there. It's tough.

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.

In a lot of ways, I wasn't a normal teenager.

A lot of people struggle in their younger years, and I think people can relate to that.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

My high school years were exactly like 'Superbad.'

All teens are in trouble in one form or another.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

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

Like any working mother I find it hard to have a social life. But my kids are so well adjusted. There isn't a brat bone in their body so I haven't done anything that bad.

Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers?

Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger. Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?

Being young is so hard. You're surrounded by judgment and fear.

I did not have the moments of so-called normal people during adolescence, like going out with friends, enjoying good times.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978. I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy.

I love 'River's Edge.'

No matter how much you urge them to relax and how much you mean it, your child probably grapples with highly stressful environments away from home, whether it's where they go to school, the teams they play on, or the peers in their social circle. Most teenagers I know long for empathy from their parents about their struggle.

'Welcome to the Dollhouse' is great. Even though it's about a girl in middle school, to me, that feels like the most honest reflection of what being a kid around that age feels like.

Kids don't come with instruction manuals. It's interesting, but after you have your kids, it's a blessing. It's not as hard as people may think it is.

Around 10, I got chubby. I knew I'd crossed a line when the only pants that fit were from the 'Junior Plenty' line at JC Penny. My parents had split up, my mom was going through a dark time, and my brother and I were getting bullied in our new neighborhood. Life was big and unsafe.

I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.