Suzanne Collins Quotes

When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.

'Knockemstiff' is a collection of short stories set in the holler of the same name in southern Ohio where I grew up. I tried to link the stories together through the place and some recurring characters.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

It's embarrassing to admit how many times I've reread the following: 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,' '1984,' 'Lord of the Flies,' 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,' 'Germinal,' 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle,' and 'A Moveable Feast.'

Being a Southerner, I'm interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting.

In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.

Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance.

Down by the river, I shot my baby dead.

Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.

Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children.. when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

War loves to seek its victims in the young.

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

President Bush threw out the first pitch Monday at Cincinnati's great American ball park. 18 Iraqis were killed.

If war was hell and only hell and there were no other colors in the palate I don't think people would continue to make war.

Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin. And I'm going to destroy it. Death is going to die.

Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

This is the bravo’s dance, the water dance, swift and sudden. All men are made of water, do you know this? When you pierce them, the water leaks out and they die.

They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.