I feel like people who criticize authors for being self-promotional fail to recognize that a lot of times their ability to continue writing hinges on sales and recognition. Some of it is for fun, some of it is for ego, but a lot of it is just writers trying to ensure longevity to their career.

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.

In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.