Quotes About Writing

I performed in high school for Black History Month at a talent show, but besides that I didn't have the resources to perform so I spent my time as a teenager writing music.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.

I was a kind of angsty teenager and I would write diaries and write stuff down all the time. Sometimes I get to the level on stage where I'm singing and it feels heavy, but not always.

I think to be a writer, you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

I didn't used to think about politics much, or social issues. I was a teenager, writing about girls.

With 'Pariah,' at the time, I had just come out. I had a coming out experience, and I was writing about it, transposing my experience as an adult: What would it have been like if I had been a teenager in Brooklyn? The funny thing was people thought I was from Brooklyn. I had to be like, 'No, I'm from Nashville.'

When I started writing 'Batman,' I lobbied heavily to get rid of Robin - or at least not use him in the stories I wrote. Fighting crime with a teenager dressed in primary colors while you're sporting a gray-and-black outfit always struck me as child endangerment, if not abuse.

I was writing my first book when I was in college. I was a teenager.

I've been a musician and a songwriter for years, since I was a teenager, and made my living doing that on and off for a long time, so when it came to writing comedy material, it was the thing that came easiest to me, the most natural way of writing.

I was talking to so many teenagers for so long that I started to feel like, 'I have my own story I want to tell, and I need to do it soon.' So I started to store away pieces that eventually became 'Speech & Debate.' I felt this burning need to write it while I still had not only all of the ideas but the passion to do it.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.

Sometimes I worry I'm writing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' for teenagers, but I'm not.

When I wrote 'Marley & Me,' I had a clear audience in mind. And it did not include children. I wrote my book for adults and assumed only adults, and possibly teenagers, would be drawn to it.

Judy Blume especially sort of broke the boundaries of what is appropriate and what should be written about - what teenagers are actually doing.

The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.

Teenagers are extremely smart, and if they think for even a second that an author is 'writing down' to them, or mimicking their voice poorly, or condescending to them in any way, they will throw the book across the room.

Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.

I'm not sure I could ever write for adults. That's not to throw shade or anything, but I feel like teenagers are much more open-minded and willing to listen sometimes.

I do research for every single book, regardless. For 'Double Dutch,' I learned to jump and learned the scoring system. For 'November Blues,' I interviewed pregnant teens. I like to get up close and personal with the kids involved in the situations I write about.

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.