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I want young readers to know that to tell their own story is the most important thing they'll ever do.

I have always been drawn to coming-of-age stories and books and movies featuring compelling young characters.

I just want to be part of great stories that are told and for them to be relevant.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.

I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.

I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn't really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I'd want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story... I developed a proposal and the characters of 'Gossip Girl' for my job.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.