John Green
John Green
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth24 August 1977
CountryUnited States of America
memories lying writing
Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.
twilight writing imagination
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
character writing thinking
When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.
writing reality trying
[My] interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable...My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience-how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us.
writing imagining-things
We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.
reading writing thinking
I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.
real book what-matters
That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.
good-life real grace
It is a good life, Hazel Grace.
girl running dream
In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.
beautiful real book
Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful.
real simplicity
Truth defies simplicity.
stars real ideas
Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
jobs real reading
...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.
girl real book
One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now."