Robert Cormier Quotes

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between life and death, and you wait for something to bring you back again.

A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.

As much as there is joy in writing, there's always the little bit of terror to keep you on edge, on your toes. It is a strange way to occupy yourself - to enjoy your life on a daily basis. There is no guarantee that something great is going to come next.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

A man I know who writes and aspires to be a novelist does very little reading, and he's not that successful. But I think it's because he's like the kid who wants to be a ballplayer and never goes to the ballpark or tries to hit a ball. So I'd say reading is the most important thing that I do, besides the actual writing. I'm always asking as I read, "How did the writer do this? Why do I suddenly have tears in my eyes? Why am I crying?"

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Kids tell me all the time, "I don't know how you do it, but that's us in the book." That's the kind of response you want, and I can't sacrifice it for the sake of somebody worried about censorship. You have to find a way to be truthful and honest.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

We often think that tragedies happen because of great earthquakes in people's lives. I think they sometimes occur because of small things that become obsessive to a particular person.

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

The rewriting is always crucial to what I do; whenever I do a scene, I always tell myself that this isn't final and that I can do it again, better. The pacing is probably from experience. I've always liked gradual disclosure. I keep thinking of my rubber-band theory. You have a rubber band that you keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and just at the moment of snapping you release it and start another chapter and start pulling again.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

I'm weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.