When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.
When I was doing all this acting stuff, all these kids, like, assumed, 'Oh, my God, you're on TV, and you probably have a lot of money.' And I was living in a garage.
We underestimate teenagers at our peril. Even the dismissive thing out on the street--look at what they're wearing. Then we'll hear stories about how a toddler fell on the tracks, and it's often a teenager who comes to the rescue and walks away because he or she doesn't want any credit. I recognize it because I've written books for teenagers--it's basically that they feel things more than adults do. They want things more than you think. They want things with greater depth than you think they do. Teenagers have got a lot of soul that adults have forgotten they have within themselves.
The problem is that everybody treats teenagers like they're stupid.
Everyone underestimates the maturity of kids.
I think people discredit teenagers and how wise they can be. Sometimes I meet teenagers who are much wiser than many adults I've met, because they haven't let any insecurities or doubts about themselves get in the way of their thoughts.
Until adolescence I thought I had the best mother in the world. Such a graceful mother. I had this fantasy that I was the wrong daughter.
I think most girls have that moment when boys they've known their whole life see them in a different way.
My dad's a very sensitive man, but as the archetypal rebellious teenager, I didn't realise that.
Our faults are apt to assume giant and exaggerated forms to our eyes in youth.
How strange that the young should always think the world is against them - when in fact that is the only time it is for them.
Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.
Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.
