Then I went home to continue my life, which had changed a little, as lives do every day, inching by microspecks forward toward whatever surprises are coming next.
The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.
So many of my books, I don’t want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.
I’m not terribly conversant with children’s literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.
I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box.
I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.
Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.
But then everyone would be burdened and pained. They don’t want that. And that’s the real reason The Receiver is so vital to them, and so honored. They selected me – and you-to lift that burden from themselves.
So actually, there could be parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents-of-the parents?
I see all of them. All the colors.
The mind can’t explain it, and you can’t make it go away. It’s called love.
Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.
Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.
I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.
There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that’s not what I do.
We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that’s why kids want precision in what they read – they don’t like that moral ambiguity.
I tend not to think about audience when I’m writing. Many people who read ‘The Giver’ now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.
Think only on the climb. Think on what you control.
I don’t set out to transmit a message. I don’t write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, ‘Oh, yes, it is there.’ But it’s not in my mind when I write.
It’s a funny thing about names, how they become a part of someone.