So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .” “Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.” “What’s that?” “The truth.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

I can't think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it's one I simply don't know anything about.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.

There's only one thing to say to the censors: Shut up.

I think when you’re dying you start looking for important things in the corners. You can’t let anything that seems even semi-important pass, because it passes forever. Things take on meaning.

...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.