teenager
Rimbaud was like my boyfriend. If you’re 15 or 16 and you can’t get the boy you want, and you have to daydream about him all the time, what’s the difference if he’s a dead poet or a senior?
Interviewed by Thurston Moore, BOMB magazine, issue 54, Winter 1996.
I see now that dismissing YA books because you’re not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you’re not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of, like the YA equivalents of The Maltese Falcon and Strangers on a Train. Weirdly, then, reading YA stuff now is a little like being a young adult way back then: Is this Vonnegut guy any good? What about Albert Camus? Anyone ever heard of him? The world suddenly seems a larger place.
“October 2007,” in Shakespeare Wrote for Money (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2008), 81–82.
I love Peter as I’ve never loved anyone, and I tell myself he’s only going around with all those other girls to hide his feelings for me.
The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition, ed. by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler and trans. by Susan Massotty (New York: Random House, 1995), 16.
Lola Shisbe had never wrecked a railroad in her life. But she was just sixteen and you had only to look at her to know that her destructive period was going to begin any day now.
The Crack Up (New York: New Directions, 2009) [reprint], 138–39.