Quotes About Understanding

You better have your story down before you take it to a teenager.

I think my family does a good job of letting me be a regular teenager, which we all need.

As a teenager, I was undeveloped and out of touch. The arts was another arena in which to do combat and challenge myself. I read difficult books like James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' but I didn't really understand it, and no one was going to call me on it because I was 16.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

I used to say teenagers were the aliens among us and I think all teenagers feel that way in many respects.

I'm pretty normal. That's why I feel like I hope most teenagers can relate.

I think all teenagers feel alone, and that nobody else knows what they are going through and all that sort of stuff.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

A lot of teenagers have parents that are maybe a little too real with them.

I write with teenagers in mind.

Teenagers are extremely smart, and if they think for even a second that an author is 'writing down' to them, or mimicking their voice poorly, or condescending to them in any way, they will throw the book across the room.

A lot of people think teenagers haven't gone through anything in their lives - they're not even 20 years old yet. But a twenty-something can go through the same type of experience or heartbreak that a 50-year-old can go through, so why does age matter?

There's so many things that I've gone through that I want to share because there's other teenagers that are going through the same things or will go through the same things.

Whenever I'm teaching teenagers, I always try to treat them, like, a little bit more gently but the same that I treat adults.

Parents ought to try to learn the language teenagers speak, and they ought to listen to teenage music.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.

Having teens of my own, who let me just add, I am not trying to impress. I come into contact with a lot of them from time to time, if I am lucky! Just listening to them is like mainlining adrenaline.

I do research for every single book, regardless. For 'Double Dutch,' I learned to jump and learned the scoring system. For 'November Blues,' I interviewed pregnant teens. I like to get up close and personal with the kids involved in the situations I write about.

When me and my author friends who write about other difficult subject matter... when you hear from teens daily saying, 'Your book helped me or made me understand a friend better, what somebody else is going through,' you see the positive things.

Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.

I wish America would stop judging and criticizing teens and instead, try to understand the battles they have to fight every day.

I think you've got to be able to relate to what teens are going through.

At the end of the day, most parents have more in common with their teens than they realize. Let's retire the bootstrap mentality and stop telling our teens that their stress is self-imposed.