I was enrolled in divinity school and thought I was going to become a minister - I'm Episcopalian - but I was disavowed of that notion pretty quickly while working at the hospital. I found myself really unfulfilled by the answers that are traditionally offered to questions of why some people suffer and why others suffer so little.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

I'm a very introverted person. Nothing that's happened has changed that, but one of the reasons I write for teens is it's a real privilege to have a seat at the table in the lives of young people when they're figuring out what matters to them.

One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea.

We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'

I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.

Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they've had fewer of them. It's like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn't want to be a minister.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

It's hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don't have robots or explosions.