Quotes from Robin Wasserman

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments

Nobody likes me," he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. "Can't imagine why," Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn't have any lungs.

If you can't remember something, did it really happen?

Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.

For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.

Full Disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going to supernova at the same time

Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.

Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on.