Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.
'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.
If you enjoy reading something, read it.
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.
My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life.
I grew up with my cousins, who were as close as brothers, and frankly, I didn't like what girls were expected to do. I liked horseback riding, playing football, going to rodeos. I wanted to be in jeans all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to conform to a certain standard, so I didn't.
I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.
When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.
I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.
My husband and I get along great. We're both introverts, and it's hard to make new friends.
When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.
Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
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.
I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.
If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
