Carmen Cusack Quotes

Kids don't shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.

I think I've been lucky enough to have had an extended adolescence. I'm a lot like I was when I was 15.

By the time I was, you know, 16 years old, I had done a lot of growing up.

I know it's hard to believe that I'm no longer the young 'Zuri' everyone has grown to love, which I truly appreciate, but like every young lady, I'm growing, I'm maturing and finding myself at 16 years old discovering the joys and pains of the world we live in.

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list.

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.

I'm not changing to the point where suddenly I wear floor-length skirts and start playing the violin; I'm just growing up a little bit, I guess.

People forget that when you're 16, you're probably more serious than you'll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions.

For my 50th birthday, I got ahold of a new print of 'Saturday Night Fever.' I see it much more as a tough coming-of-age movie than as a disco story.

I really like coming-of-age dramas. It's probably the most intense period in anyone's life, those years before you become an adult. Dramatically, there's so much to explore there. And it's nice to be around young talent coming through.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

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.

It was not until my 20s that I began to creep toward maturity.

'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.

I think that until we're 21, human beings don't get to know themselves very much.

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

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 think that every human - and this is something, you know, like, your years from 14 to, like, 23 are kind of, like, super, super existential, and you're figuring out life.

As a person, you like to see young men mature.

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.

I don't think I've grown up easily.

People grow up by living.

I think Buffy was a grown-up. One of the amazing things about the show was that I was able to grow with her. Yes, she started in high school, and then she went to college, and then essentially she was a mother to all the other Slayers, so I always felt like Buffy was a grown-up.