A Quote by Jay Asher

When me and my author friends who write about other difficult subject matter... when you hear from teens daily saying, 'Your book helped me or made me understand a friend better, what somebody else is going through,' you see the positive things.
For me, it's all about channeling the mistakes I've made and just saying all the things I wish somebody had said to me. I say to boys as much as girls: You've got to hold your chest high, and no matter what, you don't let the other side intimidate you.
A true friend is someone who is always there during the ups and downs. I have had a lot of positive things happen in my life, but I also have had some negative things that are not so fun to deal with, and not only do I have to hear it from my friends, but also everyone else as well, so it is nice to have my friends there to help me get through everything.
Somebody said, "Well, you're going to write your definitive book about your life, biography." No, I'm not. I haven't done that. I wrote a book of letters which gives an insight into the real me as opposed to the public perceptions of me. But I'm convinced historians will figure out the things we got wrong and hopefully the things we got right.
[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?" I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.
As an advocate for kids for over twenty years, I have watched things change since I was in school. Thankfully, this book made me face what I intuitively knew was real but pretended wasn't: The youth of our culture have been deeply wounded by our collective neglect and adult-driven self-focus. Young people need adults to understand what they are going through and people to care about them without a personal agenda. This book was very helpful to me, and my attitude toward teens will never be the same.
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Every day somebody comes up to me and says, 'That song really helped me through a difficult time,' or 'That's me and my wife's song' or 'This song means something to me because of... ' It's humbling to hear that. You're something special in someone's life, even if it is for three minutes.
If you don't think, and you have no wit and you have so many hangups that you can't look beyond your cup of coffee then you're never going to understand what I'm really saying. Because you know what? You're going to shut down and close off before you hear me. If I'm threatening you, you're going to see it the way you need to see it so you can dismiss me.
I feel like everything I write about is a gift I need to share because there is somebody out there going through a similar thing that might need to hear it. I know music helped me a lot. And still does.
By the time of Andi Parhamovich death, I had already grown skeptical of the Iraq war. What her death made me realize was what the actual price was. Going through that kind of loss and seeing how devastating it was on her family and friends made me decide that I was only going to write about things that I really believed in. I'm not going to compromise on that.
Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I'm very, very grateful; it's a fun job. It's a luxury.
A young lady had only one complaint about her good husband: "My husband always praises me to other people," she said, "Often I hear from friends the wonderful things he has said about me. But I miss something, because he never gets around to saying these some things to me, to my face."
I think my first general rule is that most of my experiences are not that interesting. It's usually other people's experiences. It's not that entirely conscious. Somebody tells me a story or, you know, repeats an anecdote that somebody else told them and I just feel like I have to write it down so I don't forget - that means for me, something made it fiction-worthy. Interesting things never happen to me, so maybe two or three times when they do, I have to use them, so I write them down.
Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world
<> It's nice of you to say I'm your best friend. <> You are my best friend, dummy. <> Really? You are my best friend. But I always assumed that somebody else was your best friend, and I was totally okay with that. You don't have to say that I'm your best friend just to make me feel good. <> You're so lame. <> That's why I figured somebody else was your best friend.
My first heartbreak devastated me, but it was the support of my family and my second family, my church family, that helped me understand that it wasn't my fault, and that everything was going to be alright. That helped me tremendously later in life because in this acting business, there are a lot of things beyond your control.
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