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I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.

Like many authors, I caught the writing bug during my teenage years. I don't remember the exact day or year, but I remember that reading S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders' sparked my interest in writing.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.

I remember very little about writing the first series of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.