Sarah Dessen Quotes

I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.

I've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life.

It's really good to be forced to get away and try something else, find something that's exciting.

I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

Since puberty I've always had this strange awareness that all the keener experiences I would have in my life would happen later than it would to my contemporaries. When it came to the career thing, I never worried about it. It's better if you're still peaking when you're 60, which I feel I am.

You have to live in order to have something to write about - you get caught up in moviemaking and celebrities and money, and it's very intoxicating, but it doesn't give you what you need as a writer. You have to do something else for that.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.

Many things have been said about what happened, but I don't know either. Maybe someday. One thing I'm sure of is that all the things that have happened to me, good and bad, happy and sad, have made me what I am today.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

I don't really think about having had a hard life. It was just my life, and it's all I knew. It made me who I am - all the good and bad - and it's where all of the songs on Here For The Party came from. I've lived them all.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I don't think my music has changed to reflect getting married or having kids. But... if you want to continue to write your own songs, you've got to find deeper stuff to write about. You've got to go to different places.

I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, 'Oh, God, all those wasted years!' But now I think it's just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.

You should never have regrets in life. All the steps that I have taken in my career have served for something, and I have learned from them.