Jenny Han Quotes
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A tweet in an article can feel more permanent and louder than a tweet on Twitter.
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I think that's what distinguishes YA from adult fiction - it's not just the age of the characters, but it's the sense of hope. Because I don't think I've ever read a YA book that feels completely hopeless at the end.
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I don't think kids of color should have to search far and wide to find books that reflect their experience.
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Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.
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My name is Jennifer, and when I first went to school, my kindergarten teacher called me Jenny, and from then on, I was Jenny.
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I was writing my first book when I was in college. I was a teenager.
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I write diverse books because the world we live in is diverse, and I want my books to reflect that truth.
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My sister is my very favorite person, and I dedicated 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before' to her.
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There's some of me in all my characters.
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I don't plan anything out, and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline, it can be really stressful.
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The feedback for 'P.S. I Still Love You' has been pretty amazing. To have written this story about this family with Asian-American characters and be so embraced is really incredible for me as a writer as well as a person of color.
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I started writing my first book for young people when I was in college. I was only a couple of years out of my teens when I began; I felt closer to that experience than I did as an adult. But I've always been drawn to stories about young people.
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It's fairly common to get something optioned but really rare to actually see it become a movie.
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I like to read non-fiction on my e-reader, but as for fiction, I usually like to have a copy to keep at home.
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All my writer friends outline their books, and I find that hard. It doesn't feel inspired to me. I get bored with that, and really, I just want it to be fun.
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When I finished 'P.S. I Still Love You,' I truly was done with the series. I kept saying the books were two halves of a heart. But I suppose time and space had made me nostalgic, because my mind kept drifting back to Lara Jean and Peter, wondering what they were up to.
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I came of age during the Golden Age of rom coms - like the '90s and 2000s - there were so many.
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I try to be measured and thoughtful about what I put out there because I know a lot of young people follow me on Twitter, and I take that seriously - which is why I don't exclusively tweet about cookies and 'Game of Thrones' and YA.
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I think you are going through so many 'firsts' as a teenager, and it's a charged time because of that. You don't have much autonomy in life. Everything is just kind of crazy, and there are so many huge decisions to be made, like where are you going to college or who you date. These things can really affect your whole life.
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When you're young, you don't have a lot of control over even basic things in your life - where you live, what you eat, where you go during the day, how you get there. You don't have a lot of control, and that can feel sort of unstable in its own way because you don't get a say in those basic things.
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When you write something by hand, there's a sort of intimacy that is just intrinsic to that act. You don't get to delete something in the same way, where it's like it was never there.
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Sometimes you don't know what a book is about until you are finished with it and you're talking about it.
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With Asian-Americans actors, specifically, there's been fewer opportunities for them in TV and film and fewer that have the ability to actually make a career out of it. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where they're like, 'Oh, but they're not famous names,' but they haven't had a chance to be in anything yet, either.
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I always think about race as a part of one's identity, not the whole of one's identity. You don't want it to be the defining characteristic of a character. There has to be more.