Stephen Chbosky Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult's perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story - that part of a young person's life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it's like to be twelve years old.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

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.

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

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

With 'Dazed and Confused,' I got the high school experience I didn't get to have.

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

I always wanted to make a coming-of-age film, or something about growing up, like 'The Wonder Years,' 'Stand By Me' or 'Diner.'

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

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'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.

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.

These are the pieces of my youth, the small secrets and the not-so-great expectations that defined my coming of age.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

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.

A flapper is just a little girl trying to grow up - in the process of growing up.

I see Igby as my first movie as an adult, and it's a big deal for me because I really, really like the film.

Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.