Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

It would be the death of all creativity for me if I had to sit there and be concerned with the sensibilities of a fourteen-year-old kid. Some fourteen-year-olds would revel in the book, and some would be very sensitive to it, so you can't afford to worry about that. What I worry about is good taste and getting my message across by whatever means I can.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.

That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.

Kids tell me all the time, "I don't know how you do it, but that's us in the book." That's the kind of response you want, and I can't sacrifice it for the sake of somebody worried about censorship. You have to find a way to be truthful and honest.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.