Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by Chris Crutcher

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

If you've seen 'Friday Night Lights' - that was just like my town.

I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.

What I hope my writing reflects... is a sense of the connections between all human beings... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

In 2004, one of my books, 'Whale Talk,' was chosen as an all-school read in Fowlerville, Michigan, a rural town not far from Detroit. They had done what I thought was a brilliant and innovative thing: decided to teach the book in every discipline, sophomores through seniors.

It's hard to imagine my life not writing. I love it.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking.

The premise of 'Deadline' forced me to go against my own grain with a character determined to find all that is valuable in that time. I believe this is a story about redemption; how, even with the best intentions, it's sometimes found and sometimes not.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.

You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.

When you're watching somebody read your material and they smile and nod, you know you've found that place where your experience and their experience match, even though they aren't the same exact experience.

I have made a career of creating characters who fight school authority and chomp at the bit to get out into the 'real' world and live their lives, mostly because that's the kind of teenager I was.

The kids you turn your backs on when you take away their stories are the ones who lose, as well as you as a community of adults who may appear to fear their truths.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

By the time a kid goes to college, if he's taking math or science, at least he knows, or you hope he knows, some basics. But if you're teaching history in college, you have a lot of damage to undo. You basically have to start over because so much of what a kid has already learned is just wrong.

'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

When I turned 50, I realized I was now going to start counting backwards in terms of the years I had left. Then I turned 60, and I just stopped counting. I don't have a fear of death, but I have an awareness that there's a time limit.

If I have any complaints about my youth... one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spiteful lies with malicious intent but lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain - lies told by the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives.

As much as we'd like to think life is sacred, there's not a lot of evidence for that. The universe is maddeningly casual, giving and taking it.

I can't think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it's one I simply don't know anything about.

I have no personal agenda in whether or not a library keeps 'Whale Talk' or 'Athletic Shorts' or any of my books shelved.

My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.

Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas.

I want to look at this character from all points of view. I know I don't want to make them all good or all bad or all anything... the story itself often helps create the character.

If we are to stop bullying in schools, we have to start with teachers and administrators. If we want to stop it, we have to stop it.

A sport has its own built-in integrity - doesn't need an artificial one.

The value of a story like 'Deadline' is kids get to look at death at the perfect distance. They can put the book down. They can experience the story, rub up against it, but it's not real life.

If we're going to make a real dent in the bullying issue, we're going to have to address the bullies themselves: find ways to help empower them that don't include allowing them to be predators or to simply be punished.

I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.

'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

Nothing about life is sacred until we make it so.

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your 'reporting' that you do.

Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.

The frustration for a parent is that you might be available all the time, but the kid may approach you only about 10% of the time.

My years as a therapist working with abuse and neglect families taught me at least one important lesson for my own life. Never judge until you can see through the eyes of that person you are judging, and then... never judge.

Adopted. Big Deal; so was Superman

If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.

If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us.

Nothing exists without its opposite.

Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.

...we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it.

It's a scary thing; moving on. Part of me wishes life were more predictable and part of me is excited that it's not. I think it's impossible to tell the good things from the bad things while they're happening.

You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could. It's like playing ball in some way. There are guys on the team, like Cody, I'd give my life for. But you have to be willing to lay down your life for all of them if you want to put the best you on the field. Every guy on that field has to believe you'll bring nothing back off the field with you.

...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it...Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could.

No amount of effort could have stopped that, because our points of view - the way we perceive things - are inextricably linked to our beliefs, ... ,our beliefs color what we see.

I think when you’re dying you start looking for important things in the corners. You can’t let anything that seems even semi-important pass, because it passes forever. Things take on meaning.

...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.

If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.

I believe there was a big bang and that because of that we are all connected into infinity, and I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn't also have to do with connection.

Once a thing is known,it can't be UNknown.

I'd rather be a flash than a slowly burning ember.

So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .” “Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.” “What’s that?” “The truth.