JAY ASHER

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

See, I'm not a very good musician.

Teens in the '90s had the same basic desires as they do now.

I miss video games where the jump-kick was the trickiest combo to master.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

I've always loved brainstorming with other writers, and I consider having my work critiqued a part of that brainstorming.

The Golden Rule will always be good advice!

It seems like whenever a big newspaper or TV show talks about teen literature, they focus on dark books or vampire books. It's kind of this cliche. It seems like the only time adults pay attention is with that angle.

When me and my author friends who write about other difficult subject matter... when you hear from teens daily saying, 'Your book helped me or made me understand a friend better, what somebody else is going through,' you see the positive things.

When I decided I wanted to become an author, I never thought something I wrote would be used as a way to start conversations that are otherwise difficult to begin.

When somebody's face-to-face with you saying, 'I may not have been here had I not read your book,' how do you respond to that? The first several times I traveled, it was almost too much. I was totally grateful, but emotionally, it was really hard.

I don't know anything about bullying in Huntington Beach specifically, but I would assume it's very similar to other places.

It's important to make teens realize the influence they have over others.

I was in Las Vegas, and there was a exhibit of King Tut's tomb, and it was an audio tour. At the very end of that, I just thought it would be a really cool structure for a novel, but I just didn't have a story to go along with it.

If we know it's happening, and we're not having the discussion, we're contributing to the problem of making it seem like people can't open up.

There are things that aren't supposed to be comfortable to read, because those situations shouldn't be comfortable to discuss, but they still need to be discussed.

There's this stress that is relieved when you realize somebody understands, and that's only going to happen if you feel the person who's writing the book or the people in the TV show aren't holding back.

It's funny: when I go to a school and speak, and when they hear the back story about me, they want to go read the book.

Looking back, I do think one of the reasons 'Thirteen Reasons Why' has been so successful is not because it deals with serious issues but because I had a unique and interesting way to tell that story. I knew the issues were going to be dealt with in the book, but I felt my job was to write the story as entertainingly as possible.

I think there's always room for humor, especially when you're talking about really serious issues.

My favorite aspect of being an author has always been visiting different communities and meeting my readers face to face.

I knew that part of the problem with sensitive issues is that, because they're uncomfortable to address, we have a hard time doing so honestly, if at all.

The main character in the book is usually someone you're identifying with because the story is being told through this person's mind.

What you hear mostly people gripe about adaptations is, 'They took out this scene,' or, 'They had to condense these characters.' I understand why they have to do that. But if you had a favorite character, and now they've been melded together with another one, it's disappointing.