S.E. Hinton Quotes & Sayings

#1. Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see.

S.E. Hinton

#2. Stay gold Ponyboy. Stay gold.

--Johnny quoting Robert Frost

S.E. Hinton

#3. Nothing can wear you out like caring about people

S.E. Hinton

#4. Greaser ... greaser ... greaser ... " Steve singsonged. "O victim of environment, underprivileged, rotten, no-count hood!

S.E. Hinton

#5. I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.

S.E. Hinton

#6. Mace, you never read Smoky the Cowhorse,did you?
No.
Well,ol' Smoky, he had somebad things happen to him,had the heart knocked clean out of him.But he hung on and came out of it okay.I've been bashed up pretty good,Mason, but I'm going to make it.

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#8. Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

S.E. Hinton

#9. In the daytime you aren't afraid of anything.

S.E. Hinton

#10. If you enjoy reading something, read it.

S.E. Hinton

#11. I really couldn't see what the Socs would have to sweat about - good grades, good cars, good girls, madras and Mustangs and Corvairs - Man, I thought, if I had worries like that I'd consider myself lucky.
I know better now.

S.E. Hinton

#12. But Dally, heaters kill people!
Ya' kill 'em with switchblades to, don'tcha?

S.E. Hinton

#13. But if you used to walls all that air can give you the creeps

S.E. Hinton

#14. You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you ...

S.E. Hinton

#15. All my life I wanted somebody who knew more than I did to tell me the truth.

S.E. Hinton

#16. I learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there.

S.E. Hinton

#17. They weren't looking for a fight, they were looking to fit in.

S.E. Hinton

#18. Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

S.E. Hinton

#19. 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.

S.E. Hinton

#20. Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold . . . The pillow seemed to sink a little, and Johnny died. You read about people looking

S.E. Hinton

#21. He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.

S.E. Hinton

#22. the person in this picture is really me.

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#24. Writer's were supposed to be a litte crazy

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#25. Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.

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#26. I don't know why I go to school unless for kicks, oh well might as well do dissect a frog.

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#27. We gotta do it for Johnny...Let's do it for Johnny!

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#28. Maybe people are younger when they sleep.

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#29. The shade of difference that separates a greaser from a hood wasn't present in Dally.

S.E. Hinton

#30. It goes so fast, he thought, they don't tell you that, how fast it goes ...

S.E. Hinton

#31. It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.

S.E. Hinton

#32. You greasers have a different set of values. You're more emotional. We're sophisticated-cool to the point of not feeling anything. Nothing is real with us.

S.E. Hinton

#33. I am a greaser. I am a JD and a hood. I blacken the name of our fair city. I beat up people. I rob gas stations. I am a menace to society. Man do I have fun!

S.E. Hinton

#34. What's the safest thing to be when one is met by a gang of social outcasts in an alley? ... No, another social outcast!

S.E. Hinton

#35. He died violent and young and desperate, just like we all knew he'd die someday.

S.E. Hinton

#36. Some people go, some people stay. I'm staying.

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

S.E. Hinton

#38. I'm a good judge of my own work.

S.E. Hinton

#39. We're almost as close as brothers; when you grow up in a tight-knit neighborhood like ours you get to know each other real well.

S.E. Hinton

#40. 'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.

S.E. Hinton

#41. I made up my mind that I'd get out of that place and I did ... I learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there. If you want to go somewhere in life, you just have to work till you make it.

S.E. Hinton

#42. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then, and wouldn't be so quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore.

S.E. Hinton

#43. Don't you know a rumble ain't a rumble unless I'm in it?

S.E. Hinton

#44. 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.

S.E. Hinton

#45. I always try to write the best I can.

S.E. Hinton

#46. I really do like listening to stuff that's happened to other people. I guess that's why I like to read.

S.E. Hinton

#47. Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold...

- Johnny to Ponyboy

S.E. Hinton

#48. We couldn't get along without him. We needed Johnny as much as he needed the gang. And for the same reason.

S.E. Hinton

#49. Stay gold Ponyboy,

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#51. They shouldn't hate each other ... I don't hate the Socs any more ... they shouldn't hate ...

S.E. Hinton

#52. I could never understand people being scared of things they didn't know nothing about.

S.E. Hinton

#53. Things are rough all over.

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#54. I find it to be easier to write from a man's point of view.

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#55. Some are going, some are staying....i'm in between.

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#56. Greaser ' didn't have anything to do with it. My buddy over there wouldn't have done it. Maybe you would have done the same thing, maybe a friend of yours wouldn't have. It's the individual.

S.E. Hinton

#57. In our neighborhood it's rare to find a kid who doesn't drink once in a while. But Soda never touches a drop - he doesn't need to. He gets drunk on just plain living.

S.E. Hinton

#58. You can't say, 'This is just a stage' when its important to people what they're feeling. Maybe he'll outgrow it someday but right now it's important.

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#59. Even the most primite societies have an innate resepect for the insane.

S.E. Hinton

#60. I can lie so easily that it spooks me sometimes - Soda says it comes form reading so much. But then, Two-Bit lias all the time too, and he never opens a book.

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#61. 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.

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#62. I'm not saying that either Socs or greasers are better; that's just the way things are.

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#63. If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.

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#64. I guess he had listened to more beefs and more problems from more people than any of us. A guy that'll really listen to you, listen and care about what you're saying, is something rare.

S.E. Hinton

#65. Nothing sparkly can stay.

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#66. I was desperate for something to read that dealt realistically with teenage life, and I thought others might be, too.

S.E. Hinton

#67. Greasers will still be greasers and Socs will still be Socs. Sometimes I think it's the ones in the middle that are really the lucky stiffs.

S.E. Hinton

#68. If you want to be a writer, I have two pieces of advice. One is to be a reader. I think that's one of the most important parts of learning to write. The other piece of advice is 'Just do it!' Don't think about it, don't agonize, sit down and write.

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#70. I didn't think much about that statement then. But later I would-I still do. I think about it and think about it until I think I'm going crazy.

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

S.E. Hinton

#72. They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.

S.E. Hinton

#73. I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#75. You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.

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#76. He sure put things into words good.

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#77. The difference is that was then, this is now.

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

S.E. Hinton

#79. California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.

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#80. I gotta cut smoking or I'll never make track next year

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#81. Mason is ambidextrous. That means that he can use either his right or left hand. For some reason, when I was little, I thought that meant he was part water lizard. Don't ask why.

S.E. Hinton

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

S.E. Hinton

#83. I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

S.E. Hinton

#84. 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.

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

S.E. Hinton

#86. That's why we're separated,'I said. 'It's not money, it's feeling- you don't feel anything, and we feel too violently.

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#87. He had strange eyes-they make me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflections you saw was your own.

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#88. If you want to see something funny, it's a tough hood sticking his tongue out at his big brother.

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#89. Y'all were heroes from the beginning. You just didn't 'turn' all of a sudden

S.E. Hinton

#90. You read a lot, don't you, Ponyboy?"
I was startled. "Yeah, why?"
"I could just tell. I'll bet you watch sunsets, too.

S.E. Hinton

#91. 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.

S.E. Hinton

#92. I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.

S.E. Hinton

#93. Get smart and nothing can touch you.

S.E. Hinton

#94. You are in love with Sandy?" What's it like?"
"Hhhmmm." He sighed happily. "It's real nice.

S.E. Hinton

#95. We had played a kid's version of gang fighting called "Civil War," and then later we had got in on the real thing, we fought with chains and we fought barefisted and we fought Socs and we fought other grease gangs. It was a normal childhood.

S.E. Hinton