Happy Birthday, Chris Crutcher, born 17 July 1946.
Nine Quotes
- If you think your life sucks, it probably does. Do something about it.
- 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.
- But the truth doesn’t need to be known, or believed, to be true.
- 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.
- You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.
- 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.
- You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You’ll connect or you won’t, but you did what you could.
- Racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.
- Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.
Chris Crutcher is an American novelist and a family therapist. His books include Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Deadline, and King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography. He received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2000 for his lifetime contribution in writing for teens.
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