Literary Gap Quotes

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

We've always been fans of a good mystery; we think all kids are, and there weren't any good mysteries out there these days for kids, so that's why we decided to do them.

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls.

I started writing books because I couldn't find the books I wanted to read on the shelf.

For me, hip-hop was a mirror when young-adult books were not. I could see myself in a Nas song more than I could see myself in a book.