Chris Crutcher Quotes

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Chris Crutcher

Profession : Novelist

Birth : July 17, 1946

When you're watching somebody read your material and they smile and nod, you know you've found that place where your experience and their experience match, even though they aren't the same exact experience.

Chris Crutcher

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.

Chris Crutcher

My years as a therapist working with abuse and neglect families taught me at least one important lesson for my own life. Never judge until you can see through the eyes of that person you are judging, and then... never judge.

Chris Crutcher

A sport has its own built-in integrity - doesn't need an artificial one.

Chris Crutcher

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

Chris Crutcher

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.

Chris Crutcher

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

Chris Crutcher

You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.

Chris Crutcher

'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school.

Chris Crutcher

I have made a career of creating characters who fight school authority and chomp at the bit to get out into the 'real' world and live their lives, mostly because that's the kind of teenager I was.

Chris Crutcher

The premise of 'Deadline' forced me to go against my own grain with a character determined to find all that is valuable in that time. I believe this is a story about redemption; how, even with the best intentions, it's sometimes found and sometimes not.

Chris Crutcher

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

Chris Crutcher

I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.

Chris Crutcher

I can't think of a subject that is taboo for me, unless it's one I simply don't know anything about.

Chris Crutcher

My first book, 'Running Loose', was censored back in 1983 or '84. Every book I've written since has been censored somewhere.

Chris Crutcher

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

Chris Crutcher

It seems to me if you don't know anything about child development you shouldn't intimate in your 'reporting' that you do.

Chris Crutcher

My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.

Chris Crutcher

I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.

Chris Crutcher

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

Chris Crutcher