Quotes from Cecily von Ziegesar

My high school wasn't a big public school; it was tiny. There were 36 girls in my graduating class. We were a big group of girls that by the time senior year came along couldn't wait to get away from school fast enough but we loved each other. It's really fun to see the girls at reunions now.

'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one.

Even now, I change my style and clothes from one day to the next, but during high school I blended in. I think a lot of people are that way. I guess that's why I can write about an array of characters.

I'd never really babysat. I feel like I'm Blair, or 'Gossip Girl.' A teenager, basically - and now suddenly I'm a mom?

I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don't swear, they tell their mothers everything.

the only way to tolerate the thought of her mother sleeping with that man was to get drunk-very drunk.

oh my god, she couldn't help thinking. I have hairy legs and I'm going to die alone.

I guess I was popular in high school.

I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.

I remember, in my senior year, one of my teachers taking me aside and saying: 'You look really tired.' This was when I was being a bad kid and she knew that something was wrong.

I tend to stare at people and memorize what they're saying and how they say it.

...don't act like I didn't for you. I did. Hard. And for a long time. So please, forgive me if now that we're over, I'm exhausted.

But I've always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she's just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.

Recently my publicist asked me for a college photo, and I realize how chubby I looked. I know this sounds totally shallow, but my advice is don't fall prey to the freshmen fifteen!

You know you love me. Xoxo, GossipGirl.

And who am I? That's one secret I'll never tell...You know you love me. XOXO, Gossip Girl

You can't make people love you but you can make them fear you

I feel like 'Gossip Girl' isn't really 'Gossip Girl' anymore when they're away at school because they don't go to NYU; they go to, like, Yale and Brown. New York City is just as much a character as anyone else in the books, and I was really sort of reluctant to show them off in their separate college worlds.

Who has time to make up stories when the truth is so much more interesting?

The girls show more skin these days, but I think, generally, they behave the same way as when I was growing up.

I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn't really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I'd want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story... I developed a proposal and the characters of 'Gossip Girl' for my job.

I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it's sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading 'Gossip Girl.'

Face it, you have to be sort of an egomaniac to write something down and think that anyone is going to want to read it.

No matter the truth, people see what they want to see.