Words matter. These are the best John Green Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.
Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don’t have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.
I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.
I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn’t want to be a minister.
I’ve read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you’re a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.
I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
It’s hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don’t have robots or explosions.
I think it’s crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn’t. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.
I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called ‘Every Day,’ which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It’s a really impressive execution of a really great premise.
There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles – books, in short, that are as much like ‘Angry Birds’ as possible. But I think that’s a terrible idea.
Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There’s a certain glory in both.
Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they’ve had fewer of them. It’s like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.
You can’t not like ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It’s got the best sentences in, like, ever.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by ‘Augie March.’ It’s easy to set something in Indianapolis – we don’t have ‘Augie March’ here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it’s intimidating.
I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It’s my favorite city.
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.
Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
Read a lot. Read broadly… Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored… Write a lot.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, ‘I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.’
When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.
‘Will Grayson, Will Grayson’ is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.
