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.
I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.
You need the noise of your friends in space.
Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.
At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
A library is an adjustable wrench for opening the head.
Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
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.
I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
It’s insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
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 looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.
You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
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.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, ‘Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.’
I can’t tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
I feel like it’s hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
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.