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Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'

Matthew Tobin Anderson

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Matthew Tobin Anderson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: November 4
Novelist
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
M.T. Anderson
Writing
Teenagers
Teens
Teenager
Thank
Tend
Older
Write

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Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.
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The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.
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Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven't spoken to myself since.
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I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
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I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.
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There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.
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I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
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A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
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And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.
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You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
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Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.
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Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
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At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
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Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, Ive kinda gotten over, I guess Im saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
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It’s the end. It’s the end of the civilization. We’re going down. No, it’s sure not too attractive. Lenticels. I just hope my kids don’t live to see the last days. The things burning and people living in cellars. Violet. The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.
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I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
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There is a power in names. Olakunde told us of ashe-the power which runs through all things, subtle and flexible, which find its most potent expression in human utterance so that it is a terrible thing to call down imprecations on an enemy, or to wish for anything but good, for what is said out loud is forged into truth.
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I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.
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I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.
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Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
Matthew Tobin Anderson