John Green Quotes

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

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

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 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.

We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don’t have robots or explosions.

Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s something you just are.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It’s my favorite city.

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

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.

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

In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.” (p. 28)

We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

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.