It is sometimes hard to be a family.

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

Musically I was fed up with the virtuoso thing. Our gigs had become nothing more than an excuse for us to show off as individuals, and any sense of unity we might have had when we started seemed to have gone out the window.

The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.

Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?

a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.

All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.

...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.