John Green Quotes

I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn’t want to be a minister.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

How strange and how lovely it is to be anything at all.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, ‘I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.’

I’ve read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you’re a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

You can’t not like ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It’s got the best sentences in, like, ever.

I think inspiration is always around; it’s just a question of whether or not you’re noticing it.

I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.

I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.

It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There’s a certain glory in both.

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don’t have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.