Marijuana is a much bigger part of the American addiction problem than most people - teens or adults - realize.
Love Is Louder is a movement that is hopefully going to bring some awareness and make some noise when it comes to teens who are feeling suicidal or even just sad, outcasts, and being bullied, and really feel like they have nowhere to turn to.
Herbert, my father, was born in Britain but went out to Africa in his teens to join his father and built up an 18,000-acre ranch in what was then Northern Rhodesia, providing work for the locals. He was my hero when I was a boy.
I try to give a voice to teens, who might be afraid to speak up about difficult issues, and a platform for parents and teachers to have frank, meaningful discussions with those young people.
Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.
When I look out at the audience at some of our shows, I think we are reaching a younger audience... I see lots of people in their 30s and 40s, but I also see a lot of people in their young and middle teens, and that's definitely reassuring.
I think there's a reason that horror appeals to teens. There's a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.
You're starting to see programs literally completely supported - all the data usage supported by a company. So our friends at AwesomenessTV are doing a series set on a cruise ship called 'Royal Crush' completely subsidized by Royal Caribbean cruises because they're trying to have teens see that cruises can be cool.
Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens.
In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently.
People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.
I've been a huge cricket fan since my teens, and I often used to go down to St. Helen's in Swansea in the summer. To me, it was like a 'rites of passage' experience to have the freedom of St. Helen's cricket ground.
Teens are always shown as one dimensional. They're stereotyped. When I was in high school, I cared about more than getting a date or making the team.
I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.
Teen pop will never die as long as there are teens and popular music. It just takes a different head.
I suffered from 'No one will ever fancy me!' syndrome, well into my teens. Even now I do not consider myself to be some kind of great, sexy beauty. Absolutely not.
I've always been intrigued by questions of perception and identity-building, specifically how teens and young adults define themselves within their communities.
I decided during my teens that I wasn't going to have the life of a concert pianist, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who had put a lot of money into me!
Throughout your teens and twenties, it's pretty easy to live in a suspended reality - one where you never get old or need to spend much time thinking about 401Ks, mammograms, or renewing your license. You don't need me to tell you: that ends.
Well, I didn't really grow up playing or listening to metal, like many of the kids I went to school with. I only got into it in my late teens, so when Marilyn Manson formed, it was at a time when I was still excited about approaching music from that angle.
In my teens, I joined the Parachute Regiment. I jumped out of lots of airplanes, as much as the Government budget would allow us to. I did two active tours of duty: Northern Ireland, and then the Falklands war.
When I was in my early teens, I remember coming to the conclusion that your life never ends.
Later, in the early teens, I used to ride my bike every Saturday morning to the nearest airport, ten miles away, push airplanes in and out of the hangars, and clean up the hangars.
When I was in my teens and 20s, I looked to older Italian and French women. They always seemed so incredibly attractive to me because of their confidence. And because their faces had evidence of age: lines, dark circles, and half-lidded eyes, it made that confidence so rebellious. And that was incredibly attractive to me.
Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.
The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV.
I never really had the fun teens of exploring the world because I was sitting at home, learning programming.
What teens will realize is always a mystery to me. I'm still realizing so many things myself, very belatedly, that it seems unwise to think I have any right to be showing people things in hopes that they'll realize them.
It's important to make teens realize the influence they have over others.
My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
I saw a photo of a Christian Lacroix couture dress when I was in my teens and decided right then that that's how I wanted to look on my wedding day. In my mind, that's what angels looked like.
I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.
When I was prepping for my Broadway debut as Romeo, it really hit me that I had never done that. I had trained at drama school for three years in my late teens to early 20s, and I'd studied Shakespeare, of course, but I hadn't actually performed it. So to do something like Romeo for my first Broadway role was a challenge.
I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.
I wish America would stop judging and criticizing teens and instead, try to understand the battles they have to fight every day.