S. E. Hinton

“When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.”

“My husband and I get along great. We're both introverts, and it's hard to make new friends.”

“Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.”

“Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.”

“I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.”

“Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.”

“How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.”

“I always try to write the best I can.”

“'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.”

“I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.”

“I do feel that the boys are getting left out. Girls will read boys' books, but boys won't read girls' books. If you're writing for a girl, you've got most of the audience on your side anyway.”

“When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.”

“My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life.”

“I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.”

“When I see a movie with someone it's kind of uncomfortable.”

“I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.”

“My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.”

“I find it to be easier to write from a man's point of view.”

“I think that 'The Outsiders' was meant to be written, and I was just picked to write it.”

“The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.”