Quotes About Teenagers

The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.

Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.

In the YA community, we are fighting for you and alongside you. When you make your voice heard, we're gonna be even louder on your behalf. That's definitely what I would like for teenagers to know. We've got you. We got you. I promise we do.

I think in YA there's sometimes a temptation to create heroines who are infinitely resilient and wise and confident because those are the behaviors we want to see teens embrace and maybe we want to see those things in ourselves.

I think 'Speech & Debate' surprised people because it's a play about teenagers that took the teenagers very seriously. They are very real. People wanted to see if they identified with one of the kids, that loneliness, that yearning for something bigger. That feeling of being stuck, it's very adolescent, but those kinds of feelings linger on.

I think it's becoming very acceptable for adults and teenagers to be playful lifelong. You know, it's very acceptable to be a video gamer and be 35 years old. It's acceptable to be a Lego adult fan and build amazing things, even though you're 40 or 25 years old.

To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can't do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.

I'm very traditional, believe it or not. My daughters are not allowed to date until they're at least 16 and I'm going to make it 18 for the next one.

I always find myself gravitating toward stories of transformation, and one of those periods is teenage life. When teenagers are figuring out who they are and have one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood - I think that's a really mythic moment to tell stories about.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.

Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.

Every single character and every single person in real life can all be 16 or 17 years old and maybe live in the same town and go to the same school, but every single girl is experiencing and living a different life. I think that, on the outside, it may seem like there's a lot of similarities, but there's also a lot of differences as well.

I was prom king. Which is actually saying I was the sixth most popular, because the five who were on homecoming were automatically disqualified from prom, so of course I have to look at it that way.

What's great about 'Skins' is that the characters are exactly like people around you.

I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!

The brain takes a long time to form completely. A teenager's brain is only about 80 percent finished (which may not come as a great surprise to the parents of teenagers

Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.

When more than one teenager is in a car, for instance, the risk of an accident multiplies by 400 percent.

I've discovered that much of the activity attributed to poltergeists actually happens around teenagers and menopausal women. It turns out that their increased hormonal energy floods the atmosphere with estrogen or testosterone in an uncontrolled manner, which can manifest in what appears to be ghostly or paranormal activity.

I hardly think it wise to put the idea of flying into the heads of impressionable teenagers who are already battling the challenges of lunacy.

Somewhere in the wider world kids in their teens loitered in shop doorways late at night, smoked a pooled ten gaspers and crammed their mouths with pay-by-weight sweets. They engaged in friendly bouts of scuffling and sat on damp kerbs and felt estranged.

A membership or community website that allows bullying of authors and their members to bring in traffic, is appalling and should be held accountable for hate speech, libel, and slander. It breaks down the community, condones bullying, and sets a tone for their teen members and members of any age to become bullies themselves. - Kailin Gow, October is Bully Awareness Speech.