I've been all different shapes and sizes in my lifetime. I started wearing shapewear as a teenager after I did 'Australian Idol.' I had a little tummy, and I was always really quite conscious of that.
I haven't seen my face since I started growing my beard, which was when I was a teenager, almost; I never shaved. So I don't really know what I look like.
I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
I was 17 years old and in my first band, and we played at the university. I was kind of a gawky, unpopular teenager and there was about 400 people smiling and dancing to what we were doing.
People don't mind insulting the tall. We're supposed to be fine with being awkward and skinny. I'm very easy to psychoanalyse. I was a gangly, awkward teenager who could make people laugh and thought that was a way to be socially more comfortable.
I kept a journal when I was a teenager, so I definitely look back on those to see how I dealt with friends and cliques and getting picked on, or boyfriend breakups.
The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.
I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado's a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.
Leopard print has been my thing forever! When I was a teenager my entire room was done in leopard print - it's timeless, chic, and always in style. When in doubt... leopard!
When I was a teenager in the late 30's and early 40's, electronics wasn't a word. You were interested in radio if you were interested in electronics.
It's bad timing, but a lot of kids become teenagers just as their parents are hitting their mid-life crisis. So everybody's miserable and confused and seeking that new sense of identity.
I definitely would say, by sixth grade, I was a professional shoplifter - and not because I wanted to. I'm not going out to shoplift earrings or clothes or shoes like the average teenager. I was shoplifting frozen dinners at a grocery store.
I'm not a blood and guts person. I remember seeing 'House of Wax' as a teenager in 3D. This was years ago, the original 'House of Wax', and that was scary enough for me that I thought I'd never see another one.
It is impossible to watch a 'Friends' episode too many times. Phoebe is my favourite character. I used to play her songs on the guitar when I was a teenager. 'Smelly Cat' is very easy. It's only about three chords.
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.
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.
My focus has kind of been on teenagers, you know, and I think we've got a huge crisis right now in America, among our teens.
I think I was probably an early teenager when I discovered Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and a bunch of people that are on a long list of artists. They were important to me, especially as an early adolescent.
People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.
