The Atlas

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”

“Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.”

“If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.”

“It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.”

“When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.”

“Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.”

“I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.”

“My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.”

“If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.”

“I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.”

“I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.”

“More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.”

“I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.”

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

“I grew up with my cousins, who were as close as brothers, and frankly, I didn't like what girls were expected to do. I liked horseback riding, playing football, going to rodeos. I wanted to be in jeans all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to conform to a certain standard, so I didn't.”

“The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.”

“'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.”

“I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.”

“My husband and I get along great. We're both introverts, and it's hard to make new friends.”

“Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.”

“If you enjoy reading something, read it.”

“My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life.”