You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.
Robert CormierThe possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?
Robert CormierPeople always ask me about the role models that I'm providing for kids, and I say I can't be concerned with that. I'm not worrying about corrupting youth. I'm worrying about writing realistically and truthfully to affect the reader.
Robert CormierWhen I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.
Robert CormierI don't like to think in terms of writing ten or twelve pages a day. Usually I'm writing a scene, and it's always with the idea, "I wonder what is going to happen." Or sometimes I write about something that affected me emotionally the day before and that I don't want to lose. I'm very unorganized at first; but finally it comes into a structure where consciously I'm working on a novel per se.
Robert Cormier