Lois Lowry

“I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own i...”

“I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.”

“As female hormones decrease, they're replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium.”

“I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.”

“People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.”

“When I was a kid in the '50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don't recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.”

“The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are tw...”

“I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.”

“I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.”

“When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism...”

“I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I somet...”

“I think 'The Giver' is such a moral book, so filled with important truths, that I couldn't believe anyone would want to suppress it, to keep it from kids.”

“I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyo...”

“I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what...”

“When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, a...”

“I have been fortunate. I have done so many things and enjoyed so many things and had such a great life, not to imply that it is ending, but that there aren't many things that I feel I have l...”

“Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.”

“I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science,...”

“I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.”

“In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.”