Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your "reporting" that you do.

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.

I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.

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.