Writer

My mind is always on whatever next project I'm working on.

So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity.

Kids have no sense of appropriateness. They can ask me whatever they want. You do develop a sense of intimacy with readers, and they tell you things about themselves. During a school year, I'll get e-mails asking about the books. I'll give them information, but I won't do their homework for them.

Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.

Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write.

If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.

I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.

There are those, I think, who are attracted to the glitz of celebrity life. I am not one of them.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.