Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.

I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.

I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.

I grew up here and my friends are here. There's nothing wrong with here.

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.

When I see a movie with someone it's kind of uncomfortable.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.

I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few and go nuts.

I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly. I was immersed in teen culture, but not taken in by it.

I think that 'The Outsiders' was meant to be written, and I was just picked to write it.

I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.

If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.

More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.

My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life.

My husband and I get along great. We're both introverts, and it's hard to make new friends.

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.

Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.

The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in 'The Outsiders' is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It's an everyman story.

When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.

When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.

The most profound, tangible influence in my life has been my wife, Monique. I don't know that I would even be alive were it not for her, and I certainly would not be the person that I am today.

I don't know how much influence we really had, because we never put our pictures on the albums or anything and we never really promoted the Talking Heads connection, because we wanted to keep it separate from Talking Heads.

My life would have been different without Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley. They would have to be the greatest on my list as an influence to my life at 11 years old.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.

There are a couple of teachers I have had without whose influence I would not be as happy with who I am.

It's definitely an influence, I mean how can you not say you are influenced to play rock.

When I started out, I preferred to watch my films without music, as its presence tends to mask the underlying pace of the film. I felt I could feel the rhythm of the film better without music to influence me.

The orbs create feedback loops that can influence either personal of employee behavior.

Today America lost a great elder statesman, a committed public servant, and leader of the Senate. And today I lost a treasured friend. Ted Kennedy was an iconic, larger than life United States senator whose influence cannot be overstated. Many have come before, and many will come after, but Ted Kennedy's name will always be remembered as someone who lived and breathed the United States Senate and the work completed within its chamber.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

However, it does seem now that the international community, more importantly the powers that have influence, and, even more importantly, Afghanistan's neighbors realize that it is high time that they work together, and not against one another.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.

But, I would be naive not to recognize the number of musicians who tell me they have been influenced by me and sight me - as well as Alex and Neil - as a musician who has been a positive influence on their playing.

After all is said that can be said upon the liquor traffic, its influence is degrading upon the individual, the family, politics and business, and upon everything that you touch in this old world.