Quotes About Youth

When I was 12, I snapped my arm in two. My wrist still has a funny bump because they didn't join it back together so great.

I was shot in the wrist when I was a kid. Deliberately.

My first lip balms were Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, which, correct me if I'm wrong, sometimes had little bracelets attached to the caps-meaning your lip balm could idly dangle from your wrist like a charm bracelet when not in use, not unlike some iPhone accessories.

At 22 years old, I tattooed 'family' on my wrist to not lose sight of my true goal.

When I was younger, out in public, I never wanted to pop my hip and definitely made sure that my wrist was nice and firm. All these silly, prohibitive things.

History is dependent on the new generation to write a new chapter.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you're in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life - you write about the mindset you're in at that moment.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

I used to get in trouble a lot in school because I would write very naughty stories and poems in class.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.

My first memory of the Harry Potter series was my little brother just falling into those books and not resurfacing until he was done. That J.K. Rowling got an entire generation reading is extraordinary - I'm amazed, thrilled, and proud to now be portraying one of that phenomenal writer's characters.

The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.

So at 19, I faced my first blank page as a professional writer.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.

Adolescence is the most Technicolor time in our lives. It's the time when adulthood is new and we care most about it. It contains the highs and lows that excite me as a writer.

I was painfully shy, and I had tremendous difficulty making friends. So, lacking friends, I watched other people. Watching is something all writers must do, and it was in junior high that I learned to do it.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking.

Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.