S. E. Hinton Quotes
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I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.
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If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.
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My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
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When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.
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Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.
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Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
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You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There's still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don't think he knows.
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I grew up with my cousins, who were as close as brothers, and frankly, I didn't like what girls were expected to do. I liked horseback riding, playing football, going to rodeos. I wanted to be in jeans all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to conform to a certain standard, so I didn't.
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The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.
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I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.
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When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.
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Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.
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I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.
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What's the safest thing to be when one is met by a gang of social outcasts in an alley? ...No, another social outcast!
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Johnny almost grinned as he nodded. "Tuff enough," he managed, and by the way his eyes were glowing, I figured Southern gentlemen had nothing on Johnny Cade.
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How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.
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We couldn't get along without him. We needed Johnny as much as he needed the gang. And for the same reason.
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Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.
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That's why people don't ever think to blame the Socs and are always ready to jump on us. We look hoody and they look decent. It could be just the other way around - half of the hoods I know are pretty decent guys underneath all that grease, and from what I've heard, a lot of Socs are just cold-blooded mean - but people usually go by looks.
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More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
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If you enjoy reading something, read it.
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Mace, you never read Smoky the Cowhorse,did you? No. Well,ol' Smoky, he had somebad things happen to him,had the heart knocked clean out of him.But he hung on and came out of it okay.I've been bashed up pretty good,Mason, but I'm going to make it.
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...I knew he would be dead, because Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.
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California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.