Teen Literature Quotes

The Hunger Games' is for eighth-grade girls! Winners read 'The Art of War!'

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.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

My favorite book is 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' by Stephen Chbosky.

I started a MySpace teen lit discussion group and invited people to join.

[The Outsiders] was all new to me. It's been fun to be a part of that ride, where it's become on the level of Catcher In The Rye in terms of people's required reading in schools.

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.

Richelle Mead's 'Vampire Academy' saga is set to be the next young adult paranormal series to become a household name.

Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.

I think there are worse things for a teen to be enraptured with than 'Twilight.'

In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.

Kids should read whatever they want to read. So I'm hoping that just like 15-year-olds read "Summer Sisters," I'm hoping that they'll read this.

Sometimes I worry I'm writing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' for teenagers, but I'm not.

Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls.

Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.

And they just slam the door. And they don't peek into that land any more. And they forget that teens and tweens are people, absolutely just as much as adults are. And their problems may play out on a smaller scale, but the things they go through are equally as valid as a CEO trying to figure out how to deal with a crisis at work. I just write for teens because I love 'em.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

I was desperate for something to read that dealt realistically with teenage life, and I thought others might be, too.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven, very different, I decided - and indeed it is.

The first book that they gave me was Jeannie, a young teenager. I went on with her maybe ten books.

Initially, I wanted to write middle grade. YA scared me: there's a lot of responsibility in being a YA author. It's so important to give that age range the right books that reflect their world and show them themselves.