Quotes from Jay Asher

When you're being bullied, it can feel like no one cares, and I'm so excited to tell the teens at the schools I visit that I wouldn't be there if their school didn't care.

I really love visiting schools - in fact, that's my favorite part of being an author now - even though I still get stage fright! When I visit schools, I know I'm going to be talking to some kids who don't like to read.

My favorite aspect of being an author has always been visiting different communities and meeting my readers face to face.

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

I think there's always room for humor, especially when you're talking about really serious issues.

God, I am freaking out. Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe I just look guilty of something and he's picking up on that.

The Golden Rule will always be good advice!

We both laugh. And it feels good. A release. Like laughing at a funeral. Maybe inappropriate, but definitely needed.

Usually, when somebody really hates your book, they're not going to waste time on it, telling you what you need to work on.

Every action we have is going to have repercussions in ways we could not anticipate.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.

A lot of you cared, just not enough.

Everything...affects everything

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

I miss the newness of Magic Eye posters, which really are amazing.

When I decided I wanted to become an author, I never thought something I wrote would be used as a way to start conversations that are otherwise difficult to begin.

There's no way to know exactly what someone's dealing with, no matter how open you are. You're just never going to know everything.

What you hear mostly people gripe about adaptations is, 'They took out this scene,' or, 'They had to condense these characters.' I understand why they have to do that. But if you had a favorite character, and now they've been melded together with another one, it's disappointing.

If we know it's happening, and we're not having the discussion, we're contributing to the problem of making it seem like people can't open up.

It's important to make teens realize the influence they have over others.

When me and my author friends who write about other difficult subject matter... when you hear from teens daily saying, 'Your book helped me or made me understand a friend better, what somebody else is going through,' you see the positive things.

Teens in the '90s had the same basic desires as they do now.

One of the things I found is that no matter where in the country - poor communities, rich communities - everybody deals with very similar issues of bullying. It's pretty widespread.