Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I meet blind and partially-sighted young readers all the time, and it's a shock that so few books are available to them.
If a crowd can flinch, they flinch. More than a thousand men flinch under the fist of just one. I don't see what the women do.
You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know.
I think the reason teenage fiction is so popular with adults is that adults hunger for narrative just as badly as teenagers do.
You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.
That's the thing I'm learning about being thrown out on yer own. Nobody does nothing for you. If you don't change it, it don't get changed.
It's really important to me not to be a snob about age division or about genre or whatever. The story needs to be what the story needs to be.
And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing. Each of us knowing the other.
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
People say they want freedom, but what they really want is freedom from worry. If I take care of their problems, they don't mind being told what to do.
Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.
Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.
The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.
Happiness is precious, and so I prefer to keep mine private. In a world where everyone shares everything, I can think of a lot of happy moments, but they're mine.
Viola? Keep calling for me– And I’ll keep searching for you– And I’ll find you– You bet yer life on it– I’ll find you– Keep calling for me, Viola– Cuz here I come.
No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.
Noise ain't Truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don't watch out.
Viola blows out a thoughtful air. "My dad used to say, 'There's only forward, Vi, only outward and up.'" "There's only forward," I repeat. "Outward and up," she says.
Ideals, my girl,” she says. “Always easier to believe in than live.” “But if you don't at least try to live them,” Bradley says, “then there's no point in living at all.
For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.
A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.
Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.
The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.
It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.
I'm a long distance runner, and I get my best ideas when I'm out running. It also helps that I can't write it down immediately - if you hold onto an idea, other things will stick on it.
And it’s a sad song, Todd, but it’s also a promise. I’ll never deceive you and I’ll never leave you and I promise you this so you can one day promise it to others and know that it’s true.
I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything. "Need a poo, Todd." "Shutup, Manchee." "Poo. Poo, Todd." "I said shut it."
If you're 15 and you tell someone a secret, they can put it up on Facebook. If you make a mistake, someone films it on their mobile and puts it up on YouTube. When you're 15, you deserve privacy.
If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
The only crime, the only crime is to take a life. There is nothing else.' 'And that's why you don't fight,'I say. She turns to me sharply. 'To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.
I don't purposely push the boundaries... I think if you pay attention to a story, it will have exactly as much 'difficult material' as it needs, and nobody will complain about it because you've earnt it.
It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you. It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. It's not a weakness. It's your best strength.
If you sing beautifully about nothing, no one will listen. If you sing badly about great stuff, no one will listen. Ideas are everywhere, but my theory is that a writer doesn't just think of an idea: they perform them.
Limitations can be hugely creative and hugely inspiring - so long as they are the ones you choose for yourself. I will not allow anyone to take anything off my palette, but if I do, then within that, I can be creative.
And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.
I remember the ache I used to feel when she got too close, how it felt like grief, how it felt like a loss, like I was falling, falling into nothing, how it clenched me up and made me want to weep, made me actually weep.
If the world wants you, it's gonna keep on coming till it gets you. And who am I that can fix it? Who am I that can change this if the world wants it so badly? Who am I to stop the end of the world if it keeps on coming?
Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
"Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.
Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
We have lost the idea that something can be secret because it is valuable, not because it's shameful. If you share everything with everybody, what have you got for yourself? I tweet and I blog, but I save a lot for myself. Not because I am ashamed.
Online is such a brilliant, brilliant way to connect with young readers - even if they just want to tweet, 'Hey, I read your book!' - that, absolutely, I connect with that. But I also treat writing as solitary and keep it to myself as long as I can.
In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.
I get tired of comedies where there are a bunch of funny guys and a beautiful woman who doesn't do anything funny. And I don't like books where there's a rough-and-tumble boy and a really clever, snotty girl. That's just not my experience with teenagers.
If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.
Ah, well, then you've never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it's beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains.
Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I've had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery... I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it's how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that's a wonderful thing.