Rodman Philbrick

“Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.”

“I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.”

“My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.”

“I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.”

“I used to belong to a family unit, with a foster mom and dad and my little sister, Bean, but that's over and I don't want to talk about what happened , or how unfair it was. Not yet. The less said about that the better, because if there's one thing I learned from Ryter it's that you can't always be looking backward or something will hit you from the front.”

“I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.”

“After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.”

“I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.”

“You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off.”

“remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.”

“What surprised me most about the Donner tragedy was that, given the terrible circumstances, how anyone survived at all.”

“Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.”

“Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours”

“There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.”

“Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain.”

“Shut up!" I say, holding my hands to my ears. "Shut up!"But the stupid gummy won't shut up; he's trying to tell me something important even though I'm covering my ears and I don't want to hear it and I don't want to think about who I am or what's wrong with me or why I'm out here at the edge of the Urb, at the edge of the known world, listening to some old mope who's so crazy, he think about the future when everyone knows that the future doesn't exist.”

“I am an avid fisherman, and my daily schedule is to write in the morning and then go fishing in the afternoon. In Maine, I fish mostly for stripers, and in the Florida Keys, I go after all kinds of game fish.”

“So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.”

“Keep marching boys and girls. Keep marching”

“I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.”