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" Kids have no sense of appropriateness. They can ask me whatever they want. You do develop a sense of intimacy with readers, and they tell you things about themselves. During a school year, I'll get e-mails asking about the books. I'll give them information, but I won't do their homework for them. "

Lois Lowry

Homework

You

School

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" If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it. "

" Early on I came to realize something, and it came from the mail I received from kids. That is, kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they're still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they feel about the world in general. I don't think that's true of adults as much. "

" I don't read young adult or children's books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I'm aware of what's out there. But I tend not to read the books. "

" We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity. "

Lois Lowry

Moral

Live

" I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience. "

" I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known. "

" One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later. "

" It's interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although 'The Giver' does have an ambiguous ending. I've heard about that from readers over the years. "

" I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen. "

" Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young. "

" When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power. "

" Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all. "

" I think 'The Giver' is such a moral book, so filled with important truths, that I couldn't believe anyone would want to suppress it, to keep it from kids. "

" I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person. "

" I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers. "

" So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say. "

" You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people. "

" I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today. "

" I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them. "

" I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people. "

" People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring. "

" The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me. "

Lois Lowry

Surprise

Two

" There are those, I think, who are attracted to the glitz of celebrity life. I am not one of them. "

" I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance. "

" I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what I find is that after I do that, then there are themes that emerge, which teachers can then use to provoke discussion and debate. "

" People do things that turn out badly, often for the most benevolent of reasons. "

" Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book. "

" I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box. "

" I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult. "

" I believe without a single shadow of a doubt that it is necessary for young people to learn to make choices. Learning to make right choices is the only way they will survive in an increasingly frightening world. "