Literary Birthday – 7 September – David Levithan

Happy Birthday, David Levithan, born on 7 September 1972.

David Levithan Quotes

1. I don’t want to steal anybody’s story. I very much want to use the stories that I hear to get lost in my mind, to tell a larger story.
2. Teen literature kicks ass. It has the best readers, and can be the most meaningful to its readers. And teen literature, right now, allows me to write whatever I want.
3. I just sit down and write.  I have to be in the mood for it, and usually I’ve thought at least a little about what I’m going to write before I sit down to do it.
4. I write because I am in love with life. Or I write because I want to be in love with life.
5. It’s okay to openly love writing, even when it’s hard. That it’s okay to be in love with life, even when it’s hard. That there is no reason to anything, and thus you find your own reasons. I never get a chance to talk about how much I love what I do. I really love what I do.
6. Playing with other people’s words definitely frees up some of my own, and I like to think that my knowledge of the writing life helps with my editorial work.
7. My books are always much smarter than I am.

David Levithan is an American young-adult fiction editor and award-winning author. His first book, Boy Meets Boy, was published in 2003. Six of Levithan’s books have won or been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, making him the most celebrated author in the category. He is the editorial director at Scholastic, and the founding editor of the PUSH imprint, which looks for new voices and new authors in teen literature. Among the authors he’s edited and/or published under the Scholastic Press imprint are Suzanne Collins, Maggie Stiefvater, Garth Nix, and Alice Hoffman. In September 2025, Levithan released Songs for Other People’s Weddings: A Novel.

Source for Image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Levithan_2018.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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