Robert Cormier Quotes

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t trying to get something down on paper.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don’t think about how old they are.

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It’s the adults who get upset.

It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Kids tell me all the time, “I don’t know how you do it, but that’s us in the book.” That’s the kind of response you want, and I can’t sacrifice it for the sake of somebody worried about censorship. You have to find a way to be truthful and honest.

There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that’s important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.

I don’t mean to be insolent. I’m truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell it from here. It must offend a lot of people. That’s the truth. But how many people have told you that? Instead, they either lie or try to avoid your company.

And he did see–that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.

I’m weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

We often think that tragedies happen because of great earthquakes in people’s lives. I think they sometimes occur because of small things that become obsessive to a particular person.

I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

I’m always telling myself as I write that I’m not really writing a novel; I’m just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt ‘safe’ there.

I’ve had aunts and uncles who not only haven’t read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

Writing, even though it’s hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It’s hard to trace where they come from. I can’t say that I am sitting here one night at nine o’clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.