John Green Quotes

We all use the future to escape the present.

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

I’m a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that’s been with us a long time – and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.

It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

‘Will Grayson, Will Grayson’ is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.

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.

I’m not sure if I’m depressed. I mean, I’m not exactly sad. But I’m not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I’m alone at night I forget how to feel.

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.

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

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 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 think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

I’ve read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you’re a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.