A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.

I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.

I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.

It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.

Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'

Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.

Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?

I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.

Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.

One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.

The bedroom in my apartment is far too small to hold a nightstand. There is, however, this bookshelf. Yes, I stow whatever I'm reading on the lower shelf, but more importantly, it's where I keep a collection of ghost books.