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?

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?'

It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

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.

I feel like it’s hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

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.

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.

Older teens tend to write to me and say, ‘Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.’

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.

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.