Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
it's like a squid in love with the sky.
Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.
You need the noise of your friends in space.
I could see my face, crying, in her blank eye.
We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security
A library is an adjustable wrench for opening the head.
I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.
I don't want to go out hunting for dismal topics to write about.
My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits.
I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.
It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.
I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.
A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they're peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
Image of a girl holding a blaster to a twin’s temple. “Remember, bi***. You can’t spell ‘danger’ without DNA.” Blam.
Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.
Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.
All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they're called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.
Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.
Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven't spoken to myself since.
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.
We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.' And then there are the letters from adults who say, 'This is such a good book; why did you write it for teens?'
And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.
The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books.
Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, Ive kinda gotten over, I guess Im saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, I've kinda gotten over, I guess I'm saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger. Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken
There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.
I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.