Conor Oberst Quotes

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

When you're 15, you're not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting - not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.

You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you learn from your parents' divorce or from the travels that you took.

It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?

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.

I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love.

I think, you know, when you're a teenager, sometimes your emotions are a little bit more drastic than maybe when you're in your 20s. You sort of level out a little bit.

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.

People think, because we're young, we aren't complex, but that's not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you're 16 can mirror the one you have when you're 26. Life repeats itself.

A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.

Just because I do what I do doesn't mean I escaped adolescence, all the bumps and bruises that go along with it.

In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

Peroxide' is a mix of everything I have experienced from the age of 15 until now with themes of break ups, first love, growing up - all the sorts of things that you experience at that age.

When you're in the middle of it, when you're a kid growing up, you don't think, 'This is my first heartbreak.' You just think, 'My heart is broken.' But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you're realizing, 'Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.'

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.

When you come out of your teens, you think you're sussed. But you don't know who you are at 22. You're constantly trying to fit in. You get a little lost.

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.

I'm still grappling with all the things most people resolve by the time they're 35. Maybe that's why I make music that is relevant to young people. I'm emotionally stuck at the age of 13.

When everything happens to you when you're so young, you're very lucky, but by the same token, you're never going to have that same feeling again. The first time anything happens to you - your first love, your first success - the second one is never the same.

I've lived a lot in the last 12 years or however long its been since Boy Meets World. I have a lot more to draw upon in playing Randy than I did playing Frankie. Although, I did have a lot of fun playing that role.

There were a couple of years where I got a bit lost - I went out too much, I was a bit heartbroken, thought I was a bit more of a dude than I really was. I would love to go back and have a strong word with myself.

I was really young when I was working on 'Freaks and Geeks.' In a lot of ways, that was the experience that informed a lot of what I've become, and I feel like every experience I have is in some way or another an extension of something that started there.

I don't think of them as teenage songs. The things that happen to you in high school are the same things that happen your entire life. You can fall in love at 60; you can get rejected at 80.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.