Quotes from S. E. Hinton

How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.

If you enjoy reading something, read it.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life.

I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.

You know what the crummiest feeling you can have is? To hate the person you love the best in the world.

I do feel that the boys are getting left out. Girls will read boys' books, but boys won't read girls' books. If you're writing for a girl, you've got most of the audience on your side anyway.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.

More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.

Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.

When I see a movie with someone it's kind of uncomfortable.

I grew up with my cousins, who were as close as brothers, and frankly, I didn't like what girls were expected to do. I liked horseback riding, playing football, going to rodeos. I wanted to be in jeans all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to conform to a certain standard, so I didn't.

My husband and I get along great. We're both introverts, and it's hard to make new friends.

The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.

I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few and go nuts.

I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

I learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there.

They used to be buddies, I thought, they used to be friends, and now they hate each other because one has to work for a living and the other comes from the West Side. They shouldn't hate each other.

I'm a good judge of my own work.

'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.