John Green Quotes

There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

We all use the future to escape the present.

One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.

I think inspiration is always around; it’s just a question of whether or not you’re noticing it.

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

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles – books, in short, that are as much like ‘Angry Birds’ as possible. But I think that’s a terrible idea.

You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.