It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

People talk about the beauty of the spring, but I can't see it. The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, and I can tell that something wet, and soft, and cold, and misshapen is about to be born. And I am turning into a vampire.

We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.