Jesse Andrews Quotes
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There's a certain trope in young adult fiction. A young girl gets cancer and becomes this radiant person who's a fountain of insight. Everyone who encounters her is changed for the better. That doesn't happen all the time. The whole thing is much more difficult to process. Adults have trouble with it, so why shouldn't we expect teens to?
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I was in a lot of bands growing up.
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I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
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I'm influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.
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My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.
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Writing is more important than being a writer.
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My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.
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Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.
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My tastes are pretty varied. For instance, I love Wilco. But it's considered dad rock. It's one of my favorite bands, and yet I find it impossible not to think of myself as a dad-in-training when I listen to it.
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As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.