About Lauren DeStefano: Lauren DeStefano is an American young-adult author. She is best known for the Chemical Garden series of novels and her gallows humor.
Her smile is her revenge.
She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means...Her smile is her revenge.
Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, '"Real' is a dirty word in this place'.
We writers are resilient souls.
I realized how wonderful YA is and how I really wanted to write something that created that level of intrigue.
When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.
When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of...
'Dystopian,' by definition, promises a darker story.
We're all born an empty page.
It doesn't matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.
You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.
Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.
Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.
It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.
