Caitlin Flanagan Quotations

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.