Rebecca Stead

“There's this trouble with books for me because I'm terrible at thinking of titles. The truth is, even with the titles that I've landed on in the end, they always feel wrong. I think it's because of this whole problem of having to package your book in a certain way.”

“I'm always thinking about identity. And the middle-school years are a time of exploring questions about who you are and who you want to be. For the first time, you see the world in a broader sense.”

“As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.”

“Mostly what I try to do is build emotion. Only I'd prefer not to do it by telling you about emotion but by pushing that emotion down.”

“From age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses, going to the store. I really wanted to write about that: the independence that's a little bit scary but also a really positive thing in a lot of ways.”

“I like the idea of a world, even within a big giant city, where you're not anonymous. You have an identity, and that's an identity that's known just sort of by shopkeepers. I felt that as a kid, and I loved it.”

“I think that kids are a wonderful, wonderful reader to have in your head.”