Top 22 John Green Quotes

I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are ‘realistic novels,’ but they can also be fantastical, so it’s nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, ‘I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.’

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.

Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they’ve had fewer of them. It’s like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called ‘Every Day,’ which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It’s a really impressive execution of a really great premise.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn’t want to be a minister.

I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

I think it’s crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn’t. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.

Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by ‘Augie March.’ It’s easy to set something in Indianapolis – we don’t have ‘Augie March’ here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it’s intimidating.

Read a lot. Read broadly… Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored… Write a lot.

One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.

I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.

Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There’s a certain glory in both.

I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.