MO Quotes

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

When I was 15, I wore combat boots with a fluorescent Columbia ski jacket. I was trying to find myself.

Some people go through a rebellious phase, and they separate and understand that they're not who their family thinks they are.

I definitely went through some dark teenage years. I wore black raccoon eyeliner every single day. I would be late to school if I didn't have time to put my eyeliner on.

It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.

When you're 15 whatever your parents tell you you should do, you're not going to do it.

When I was 13 and looking for my identity, I was obsessed with hippies.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.

I think when your parents are as rebellious as mine were, it's difficult to top them. So what's the point?

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels? That's the age-old question. I guess I could have by not going into the arts, but the thing is, I couldn't do anything else.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

I didn't rebel as a child. I missed that angry teenager thing.

I was not a rebellious teenager. I was a sit-in-your-room teenager.

At Murry Bergtraum High I wanted to be as different from my father as possible. So I acted out in school, I was very anti-authority.

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

I didn't try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.

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.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.