“The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?”

“I keep waiting to feel old, to feel like a grown-up, but I don't yet. Do you think that's the big secret adults keep from you? That you never feel like a grown-up?”

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”

“Adults are only kids grown up”

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

“If you're referring to yourself as a 'grown-up', then you're still totally a kid. 'Grown ups' call themselves adults”