Deb Caletti Quotes

High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life - those people are liars... Who wants the best years of their life to be in *high school*? High school is something *everybody* should be ready to lose.

What they teach you in school doesn't prepare you for life. Textbooks don't compare to living in the real world. Rock and roll teaches you how to live.

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

For my parents to let me turn down the money that I have been offered to go pro, it's unbelievable. They want me to enjoy my senior year in high school. I am so excited to be a senior, finally. It doesn't get more fun than that.

It meant a kind of real liberation of expression. It embraced amateurism in a way that I still am inspired by. It was not about trying to get, you know, stadium gigs or even commercial radio play or even record deals for that matter. It was about saying something 'cause you meant it, and expressing something that you felt. And that was primary for that - whatever the scene, whatever punk rock means, it was very, very important to me, very formative.

It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."

I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.

You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

My lack of access to the real world has been replaced completely by books, and it can’t be healthy to live in a land of happily ever afters.

I've had a lot of people who've said they can relate to the show and it's helped them through a lot of difficult times, especially the kids in high school now. Everyone kind of feels like an outcast in high school. Even if you're super popular, you still have issues.

Beauty is a complex theme, for sure. We all have a different concept and opinion regarding it, but we all like to look at things that are aesthetically pleasing. I had the typical high school experience, where you question what is beauty, and you're comparing yourself to others, it was just part of growing up.

High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.

I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions: Yes. Yes. No. One time in high school. Three times in my twenties. Rocks no salt. Yes. Four. Never. And how dare you! I will take no further questions.

I wanna run through the halls of my high school, I wanna scream at the top of my lungs. I just found out there's no such thing as the real world, just a lie you've got to rise above.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

There was no one really like John Bender at my high school.

Wouldn't it have been weird to go to high school with the Pope? You know, somebody did, someone's sitting at home, watching TV in Poland, they see the Pope, they think, "That guy was a jerk! He was so mean to me and now he's Pope? I got a swirly from the Pope!"