Robert Cormier

“All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street.”

“Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.”

“He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.”

“They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.”

“I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.”

“I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.”

“My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.”

“Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.”

“He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.”

“I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.”

“The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone”

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.”

“There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.”

“I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.”

“The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?”

“I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.”

“I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.”

“You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.”