Quotes About Writing

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

I think it's best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, 'Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.'

There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy.

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

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.

You have tremendous freedom in the young adult book world to write what you want. You can put R-rated content in a book that you can't in a similarly targeted movie.

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

It's - I write the books and let the market find who reads it. I guess a young adult is anywhere from ten to fifteen.

Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre.

I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.

I had to take a big risk by writing my young adult book series 'The A Circuit' and putting myself out there in that way. I don't consider myself a good writer, so I had to rely on a co-writer. Still, I knew that people would judge me and my writing. I am really proud of the way the series turned out.

Young adult author Richelle Mead holds the distinction to perhaps be the only author ever to have a book banned... before it was even written.

I used the second year of my MFA program to write a young adult novel and began pursuing picture books as well. I loved the economy of this art form, choosing, with pristine attention, the exact right words to tell the exact right story.

I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA.

When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.

I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.

I don't think I consciously decided to write for the young adult audience; my subconscious decided for me.

I think it's a mistake to think, 'Am I going to write a young adult book, or do I desperately want to write a book for adults?' I think the better ambition is to try to write someone's favorite book, because those categorizations of adult, young adult, become kind of superfluous.

I am a young adult author, and so are quite a few of my friends. We all write books for the same demographic; many of us are even published by the same publishing house. Two of us, in fact, share the same editor.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.

I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books.