Quotes About Coming-of-age

Just because you have teenagers in a movie doesn't make it a teen movie.

'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.'

'Until Friday Night' is the first book in my new young adult series, 'The Field Party.'

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 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.

In ancient African cultures, a young man was not considered a full member of the tribe, an elder, a man. He couldn't marry and he couldn't own land until he had killed a lion. It was symbolic.

When I did a study of all the coming-of-age movies that meant a lot to me, whether it was 'The Graduate' or 'Rebel Without a Cause' or 'Dead Poet's Society,' they all had that timeless feel. None of them were completely married to the details of their age. They felt timeless in their treatment of it. That's what made them resonate with me.

I wanted to make a movie that was kind of a tribute to the way I feel when I watch a John Hughes movie.

'Skins' meant so much to so many people. It was so much part of its time, and I was so young.

This was another item about growing up: you encountered all the cliches of love and loss and heartbreak.

It was amazing to see the actual moment when Denny the boy became Denny the man. I admit that I had a case of Jew envy. It's possible I always will.

It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

Jim MacLaine was the hero of Ray Connolly's 1973 movie 'That'll Be the Day', about a young man turning his back on a university education at the turn of the '60s in order to try his hand in a rock n' roll band.

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

The Wood was about young people and the other one is more of a grown up movie.

'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.

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.

A lot of shows and movies that have tried to represent teenagers or the chaos that is coming at that age, they shy away from it, romanticize it, or they kind of fantasize what it's like to be a teenager.

I loved everything about being ten, eleven, and twelve years old, and seem to make most of my heroines and heroes that age so I can reexperience all those pitfalls and wonderful discoveries. It helps me to figure out my own life when I write from that eleven year old place!

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

First published in 1984 when I was nothing more than sticks of bone at seven, 'Dragons of Autumn Twilight' began what would be one of the icons of my grunge-stained disenchanted childhood.

Well yes, my son was bar mitzvahed last April, after I made this film.

'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

My bar mitzvah, I went to my nan's, and she made kugel.