Patrick Ness Reader Quotations

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.

I meet blind and partially-sighted young readers all the time, and it's a shock that so few books are available to them.

How you leave the reader is so important - not the climax; I call it the 'exit feeling'.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.

Online is such a brilliant, brilliant way to connect with young readers - even if they just want to tweet, 'Hey, I read your book!' - that, absolutely, I connect with that. But I also treat writing as solitary and keep it to myself as long as I can.