Alexi Zentner

“I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.”

“I've said many times that there only two things to write about: love and death. And when you have children, you remember that the world is full of sharp corners and dangerous things, and suddenly you have these small, soft creatures, which you love in almost painful way.”

“For 'The Lobster Kings,' I listened to a lot of Johnny Cash. And it makes its way into the book.”

“There is a huge tension in trying to write with small children because they demand your attention and your time with a fierceness that can be matched by nothing else, but if you are successful in writing while you have small children, I actually think that your writing is likely to be deeper than it was before.”

“I liked the idea of being a writer more than I liked the idea of writing.”

“When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.”

“While Shakespeare wasn't the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he's one of the loudest voices.”

“To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.”

“I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.”

“I'm absolutely terrified of spiders.”

“I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?”