Matthew Tobin Anderson Quotes
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Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger. Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?
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If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
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Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
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I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.
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One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
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Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
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It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
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I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
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I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
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We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they're peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.
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I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
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I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.
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I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
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A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
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I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
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Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.' And then there are the letters from adults who say, 'This is such a good book; why did you write it for teens?'
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I don't want to go out hunting for dismal topics to write about.
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The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books.
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Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.
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Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, I've kinda gotten over, I guess I'm saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
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I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.
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I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
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It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
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Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?