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.

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.

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 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.

Adopted. Big Deal; so was Superman

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

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.