Robert Cormier Quotes

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

Affection is one of the most neglected words in the English language, that people throw the word love around like confetti when they mean affection.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

I'm weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.

I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.

It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.

Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.

I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something for themselves.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

I don't think I began to be a professional writer until I learned my weaknesses and what I couldn't do. This forced me to compensate.

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

I sometimes get tired because I can seldom read a book for pleasure. I'm like the play reviewer who happens to go to a play on an off day and can't help but view it critically.

We often think that tragedies happen because of great earthquakes in people's lives. I think they sometimes occur because of small things that become obsessive to a particular person.

A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.

...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.

I wonder if it's a special sin to lie to a nun

The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.