It’s the end. It’s the end of the civilization. We’re going down. No, it’s sure not too attractive. Lenticels. I just hope my kids don’t live to see the last days. The things burning and people living in cellars. Violet. The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.
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 wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
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 are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.
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.
It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
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.
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.
I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.
I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.
At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
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.
You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
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.
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.
One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
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.
