Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.
The children's writer not only makes a satisfactory connection between [the writer's] present maturity and his past childhood, he also does the same for his child-characters in reverse - makes the connection between their present childhood and their future maturity. That their maturity is never visibly achieved makes no difference; the promise of it is there.
Adolescence is a relatively recent thing in human history -- a period of years between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. This irresponsible period of adolescence is artificially extended by long years of education, much of it wasted on frivolities. Tenure extends adolescence even further for teachers and professors.
The unsparing savagery of stories like “The Robber Bridegroom” is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as to the culture of childhood... They capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience.
For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.
When you are 8 or 9, you should have a childhood. You should have adolescence. You should go through everything in a normal way.
I think the category of perpetual adolescence, it's a new thing, and it's a dangerous thing. Adolescence is a pretty glorious concept. It's about intentionally transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. Peter Pan is a dystopia, and we forget that.
Between the innocence of boyhood and the dignity of manhood, we find a delightful creature called a boy....A boy is truth with dirt on its face, beauty with a cut on its finger, wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the hope of the future with a frog in its pocket.
The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.
Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.
Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger.
None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.
A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over - there's not new childhood stories to come. They've all been mentioned.