Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.