Lois Lowry

People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.

Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today's children are not as patient. The best example of this is 'The Secret Garden,' which I adored as a child.

I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

Oddly, the military world is one of great sameness. There is an orderly quality to life on an army base, and even the children of the military are brought up with that sense of order and sameness.

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.

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.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

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

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.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

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

When I was a kid in the '50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don't recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.

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

Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.

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.

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.

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

I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'

My mind is always on whatever next project I'm working on.

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

In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island, which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Of course, that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation.

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

Most people remember being 4 objectively, as if they're seeing a movie of a 4-year-old. But me, if you ask me to think about when I'm 4, I can feel myself being 4, and I am there, looking out through my 4-year-old eyes.

This may sound strange, but at a very early age, at around 3, I was aware that I was smarter than the other kids.

Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.

When I moved from Cambridge, I donated all my fiction. I carefully cut out pages the authors had autographed for me. I didn't want those autographed books showing up on eBay.

People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.

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

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.

I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

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

There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that's not what I do.

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.

As female hormones decrease, they're replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium.

Writing is self employment, so you can make your own schedule.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

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

The fact that I lost my son permeates my being.

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

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

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 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 would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.

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.

If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.

I have been fortunate. I have done so many things and enjoyed so many things and had such a great life, not to imply that it is ending, but that there aren't many things that I feel I have left undone.

Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.

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.