Quotes About Engagement

I remember being a teenager and feeling like I could talk to anyone anywhere about anything.

I started doing organizing work as a teenager. I was part of an organization called the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement at 14.

When I was a teenager, I was very political.

Children and teenagers don't easily relate to stories about kings and dukes, and to tell only stories about kings and dukes is to ignore the regular people.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.

I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.

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

Sometimes your kids give you that shove out the door to do things that you need. Teenagers are good that way; they keep you in the loop.

My perspective is that, when you're a kid, if your audience is a group of children or teenagers, you do have some level of social responsibility. I feel that.

Parents ought to try to learn the language teenagers speak, and they ought to listen to teenage music.

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.

Teens look at cause-related efforts with some scrutiny. They know they are often a target market, but it has to make sense to them.

The best thing about being Children's Laureate has definitely been all the children and teens I've met.

I've been an activist since my late teens. I take this very seriously and try to use the gift that's been given to me - access to the media - as positively as I can.

In the case of 'News Radio,' I loved that show. I loved the actors and the producers, but I was longing very much for something more to sink my teeth into me. I think it was an incredibly smart show, but I found myself on the peripheral of a lot of it.

It's like pulling teeth to get me to do photo shoots. And I don't mind doing interviews if they're by phone, but I hate to go sit down and have to meet somebody somewhere, you know what I mean.

There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.

If you are going to do something potentially for another eight years, you want it to be something that you can really sink your teeth in and that's going to be different and interesting for this next period of time.

I love low-budget projects with great acting and great stories you can really get your teeth into.

I was waiting for something to sink my teeth into, so I was all-in to be Miss Ivory of The RTC. It was great fun too!

And when your phone rings, pick it up. Open yourself up to the possibility a phone call offers. Discover this remarkable device called the telephone. It will give you a serious competitive advantage.

I have a permanent moustache so I can be a 'Movator:' I take random telephone numbers and ring people up and 'movate' them to grow moustaches.

There are great news anchors; they're probably very smart, but they're not talking to the audience like real people. They're just reading from a teleprompter.

While television is a good servant, it's a bad master. It can swallow up huge quantities of our lives without much happiness bang for the buck.