A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.

I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller.

It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.