I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like.
I think I'm trouble-adjacent. I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like. I skirted the stuff that other kids were doing because the idea of actually getting in trouble was not appealing to me, but I still wanted to have adventures.
They were marketing me as a teen idol, when the stuff on the record was not what teen idols were doing at the time.
I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn't know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.
I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn’t know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.
I think anybody who's doing work in their teen years on TV or in the movies, you're a teen idol by default.
The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films.
When it was first optioned, I was told that the chances of The Basic Eight becoming a film were slim because no one was making teen movies, and then later, I was told that the chances were slim because there were so many teen movies, and then I was later told that the chances were slim because teen films were over. I'm not sure when the magic window of opportunity was, but perhaps it's still on the horizon.
My high school years were fun and frustrating, typical of the teen years. The most important accomplishment was meeting my wife, Ruth.
People always ask, "How do you get in the mind of the teen reader?" I think all human beings have these common threads. We struggle with the same things. We desire love and attachment. We have to sort out how much we want to be attached and be independent, how we manage need and being needed and being hurt. These are things that begin when we're - how old? Then in those teen years we start to really feel them.
It's hard being homeless at any age, but at 16 years old? I can't even imagine. When you're a homeless teen, how do you build a future or have any sort of life?
The middle years - the eighteen-seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties - were a time of moral bankruptcy when men stole millions by a stroke of the pen or by the simple expedient of printing tons of worthless paper.
We were teens in the Eighties, and that's the kind of music that we all grew up on. When you're in those really formative years, from, like, 13 to 19, what you listen to is so influential, and I think that's just part of our being now.
I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls.
Growing up in New Jersey, teen clubs were your life. I'm not kidding! That was it. I was literally tied up five days a week with teen clubs; my parents would drop me off. Like, I didn't even drive.
We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn't return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the U.K., it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn't date. That was one thing my parents made very clear.