Quotes from Suzanne Collins

you're playing on their natural instincts to flee danger. Thinking like your prey . . . that's where you find their vulnerabilities,

I'll be your Mockingjay

he doesn't meet my eyes.

I'm not a very fancy person. I've been a writer a long time, and right now 'The Hunger Games' is getting a lot of focus. It'll pass. The focus will be on something else. It'll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.

What do we do know?(Peeta)I guess we try to forget...(Katniss)I don't want to forget.(Peeta)

Orange?" He seems unconvinced."Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset, " I say. "At least, that's what you told me once.

Sometimes, when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread

I think we put our children at an enormous disadvantage by not educating them in war, by not letting them understand about it at an early age.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

I try to catch flies in cups and put them outside. After I wrote 'The Underland Chronicles'... well, once you start naming cockroaches, you lose your edge.

If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.

I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to reach for him across the hundreds and hundreds of miles, to send my thoughts into his mind, to let him know he is not alone. But he is. And I can't help him.

Well you are a piece of work aren't you?

Exactly how am I supposed to work in a thank-you in there? Somehow it just won't seem sincere if I'm trying to slit his throat.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

They more than do their work, they take pride in it. Like Cinna.

Beauty that arose out of pain.

Positioned on my dresser, that white-as-snow rose is a personal message to me. It speaks of unfinished business. It whispers, I can find you. I can reach you. Perhaps I am watching you now.

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

In high school for a couple years we did archery.

At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead.The hard thing is finding the courage to do it.

District 12. Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

'The Underland Chronicles' is an unnecessary war for a very long time until it becomes a necessary war, because there have been all these points where people could have gotten off the train but they didn't; they just kept moving the violence forward until it's gone out of control.