I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16; I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining.
Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.
One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them.
This object that we hold in our hands, a book... that tactile pleasure, it's just not going to go away.
I focus on the elements of a movie that are meant to invisibly affect me as a viewer. The edges. As an author, I'm aware of how the subconscious things can pluck at a reader's emotions, and I love it when filmmakers do the same.
I really love nature. I grew up in the country. But one of the things about nature is that it is beautiful but it's also very dangerous.
I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.
A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.
My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.
Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.
I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.
Teenagers want to be able to fight for what's right - but finding out what's right is now 90 percent of the battle.
Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.
When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.
I love inventing interesting people and then pushing them to their absolute limits - and usually those absolute limits involve homicidal faeries, werewolves, or some other paranormal menace.
Once upon a time, I was very shy and you wouldn't even see me in a room. Then, when I was 16, I made the conscious decision to not be afraid of anything - this was about the time I picked up the bagpipes too - and my life pretty much changed forever.
When I was a teen, I thought I would have to choose between my writing or my music or my art, but it turns out it's a difficult juggling game but I can do all of them.