Rodman Philbrick Quotes

His heart was simply to big for his body.

There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.

I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.

I have vivid memories of junior high school. I didn't quite know how to deal with kids and make friends and all of that. If you talked to people who knew me at the time, they'd think I was a popular kid in school. But boy, I didn't feel that.

I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.

It's fun to be amazing, to be the star of the show, to have everyone watching you - even if you have to act like a pig.

Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of everything, even pain.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

Books are like truth serum
if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

You can take him, right?" he asks a couple minutes later.
I go, "Are you kidding? You can't just fight Blade, you have to fight his gang, too."
"You mean you couldn't take him and I was giving him lip?

In his opinion, humans were best when miserable, and so he had worked at being miserable his whole life, and in his generous way tried to make as many people miserable as possible.

I used to belong to a family unit, with a foster mom and dad and my little sister, Bean, but that's over and I don't want to talk about what happened , or how unfair it was. Not yet. The less said about that the better, because if there's one thing I learned from Ryter it's that you can't always be looking backward or something will hit you from the front.

You can't mess around with young readers - you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.

I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember.

I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.

I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for awhile, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.

I am an avid fisherman, and my daily schedule is to write in the morning and then go fishing in the afternoon. In Maine, I fish mostly for stripers, and in the Florida Keys, I go after all kinds of game fish.

Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. "You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?" she asks.
"No, what?"
"Blue sky."
"You're zoomed."
"You ever eat blue sky?"
"No," I admit.
"Try it sometime," she says. "It's apple-flavored.

Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.

Keep marching boys and girls. Keep marching

freak the mighty is the best book I ever read so I recommend it to anyone who likes good books that have different feellings and emotions

I wrote Freak the Mighty because Max, the mighty half of Freak the Mighty, insisted and he's bigger than I am.

BOOK, a four-letter word for truth serum" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 161

As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.

Every word is part of a picture, Every sentence is a picture. All you have to do is link them together.

I'm thinking maybe letting the latches burn is the right idea. Let everything burn until there's nothing left but ashes and cool rain.

After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.

The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you

I was never forced to write. At least, I was never forced or even encouraged to write fiction. Creative writing wasn't in the curriculum at my school when I was in sixth grade.

He's a feral child. No mother, no father, no one to care for him or raise him or teach him how to be human. So he's existed much like an animal, without language. He thinks in images, not word."
"How strange," Lanaya, sounding amazed.
Ryter shakes his head sadly. "Not strange, I'm afaraid. His condition is all too common in the latches. And becoming more common every day.

For the last week or so it's like getting jabbed with a little needle every time I hear that word. Gram is trying to pretend how excited she is I'm finally in the eighth grade, like this is a really big deal. Which is a joke, because the only reason I got passed from seventh grade is because they figured this way the big butthead can be - quote - someone else's problem, thank God, we've had quite enough of Maxwell Kane - unquote.

Remembering is just an invention of the mind ... It means that if you want to, you can remember anything, whether it happened or not ... You don't need a time machine if you can remember.