We get crazy when we can't make things be like the world tells us they are". She looked back out the window. "It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean, how could I have loved him that last year? I didn't even know who he was. He was way more attracted to drugs and bikers and that whole lifestyle than he was to me. But somebody told me that if you really loved somebody,you stayed with him no matter what. You had to fight for him." She laughe. "Hell, I was convinced.

A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn't need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished and manipulated by people with agendas.

Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school.

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.

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.

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it...Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.

...we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it.