Teenage Identity Quotes

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

When I was teenager, Britney Spears was it - that was the pop world that was happening, and I knew I wasn't in it.

I don't think teenagers in 2017 identify with heterosexuality, and that's a positive.

I think, for many teens, a fundamental fact of the teenage experience is that you're in between this childlike state, in which you're told you're completely unqualified for just about anything in the adult world, and this adult world, where you're being told you have to be responsible, and you're just trying to figure out where you stand.

When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.

Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language.

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

In my 8th grade yearbook picture I had on 2 chains.

Growing up in San Antonio, I was the dork at the Friday night football games with my head buried in a book - Jack Kerouac or Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

When I was fourteen and first started going out, I always wanted to be the opposite of everyone else. So I would go to the club in a polo T-shirt and pants and sneakers and a hat on backward, just so I would not be dressed like other girls.

When I was 13 years old, I was dressing in a rap style. And then I changed schools, and the rap style became old-fashioned, so I changed it completely.

I had found The Runaways and I had seen Foxes, and I decided I was just gonna become a juvie, like Cherie Currie.

People say, 'Do you ever miss being a normal teenager?'

When I was young, there weren't any teenage girls I could relate to in film. They were all put in boxes: the virginal good girl, the really sarcastic asexual one. I wanted to do something that represented how I felt then.

When I was a kid I was the king of mullets. If you’re wearing a rock T-shirt and you’re a fan of Rush – one of the greatest bands in the universe – you’ve got to have a mullet.

It's interesting because a lot of my 16-year-old kids' friends know me from 'Wedding Crashers,' and not so much Bond. My kids have a good laugh. I was 20 then. The look I had then was the look that a lot of their friends are assuming now. They think it's cool. What goes around comes around.

Each generation needs a 'Spider-Man' to mirror their angst.

Jughead, to me, was reflective of a teen experience that made a lot of sense to me.

As a teenager, you are still entirely wrapped up in yourself.

No 17-year-old is just one thing, especially in this day and age. Kids are into all sorts of things.

Every teenager feels like a freak. It's part of being a teenager, part of the individuation from child to adult - those teenage years are who am I? What am I? Where am I going?

'Will Grayson, Will Grayson' is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.

Stop…stop, that’s the next generation of fans… How dare you pass judgment on those 12-year-old girls who like vampires! They need to be encouraged because in six years they’ll be 18-year-old girls who like vampires and are into all sorts of goth-permissive and whatnot. Don’t Poo-poo it. There’s a plan, and it’s working.

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?