Quote

'Middle school' is used as shorthand for a time when things change. It's a time a lot of kids feel like they don't even have one good friend.

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexuality, and that breaks my heart, because they're going to have to - high school's hard enough to overcome. Middle school is hard enough to overcome when we get out of it. They say life is what you spend your time getting over because of high school, you know what I mean?

Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passions - art, music, sports, what have you.

I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn't a difficult thing to pull out.

I feel, as an adult, I'm very similar to how I was as a pre-teen. Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but I feel like it's easy to slip back into those shoes, and I feel like if we were all magically transported back to our middle school years, we'd all act like we did in middle school.

There's a lot of middle school behavior in Washington, D.C. I look at that and I say, 'I've seen that before,' it was just with a 14-year-old.

Instilling a sense of self-discipline and focus when the kids are younger makes it so much easier by the time they get into high school.

My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.

Nothing could be as hard as middle school.