Lois Duncan Quotes (13 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Lois Duncan: 13 quotes 0 likes

Famous Lois Duncan Quotes

“Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.”

Lois Duncan

“I understand the craft of writing, because it’s who and what I am. The commercial world of publishing, both in the past and today, is an ongoing mystery to me. Fads are constantly changing.”

Lois Duncan

On writing and publishing, interview with Megan Abbott (2011)
2003–2016

“I started thinking about charismatic psychopaths like Charles Manson and wondering what they were like as teenagers? They didn't just spring full-blown from oyster shells -- they had to hone the "people skills" that allowed them to become so manipulative as adults. Kids like that are growing up within our school systems and can exert tremendous control over their fellow students. I consider "Griffin" a cautionary tale about the danger of peer pressure.”

Lois Duncan

On the basis of her novel Killing Mr. Griffin (1978), interview in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

“I was in my forties and teaching magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. I was hired on a fluke. The professor who was scheduled to teach the course became ill, so the chair of the department, my personal friend Tony Hillerman, asked me to fill in for a semester. Tony knew I’d never been to college and didn’t care; he just knew I’d written successfully for magazines for years. The original professor never returned, and someone else replaced Tony as Chair and automatically kept me on. I discovered I loved teaching writing and started to get worried that my deep dark secret, (no college!) might be discovered, so I began taking courses under my married name, Lois Arquette, hoping I could get a degree before someone “outed” me. In the course of that endeavor, I took a juvenile literature class where they were studying “Lois Duncan books.””

Lois Duncan

My fellow students were excitedly writing A-plus papers about how many of my books were based on Greek myths. I had never even read those myths!
On teaching and attending college, interview https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20111119202009/https://abbottgran.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/the-deep-bottom-drawer-an-interview-with-lois-duncan/ with Megan Abbott (2011)
2003–2016

“It came naturally. I came from a family of strong women.”

Lois Duncan

On writing female characters, interview with Megan Abbott (2011)
2003–2016

“A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it.”

Lois Duncan

On the adaptation of her novel I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, quoted in MoviePilot https://moviepilot.com/posts/3514425 piece
1990–2002

“I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself a writer.”

Lois Duncan

Quoted in The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies (1997), p. 109
1990–2002

“Killing Mr. Griffin doesn't encourage violence in schools any more than the story of Cain and Able encourages children to kill their younger brothers.”

Lois Duncan

On violence in her novels, interview in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

“Ironically, when it was released in 1979 it was challenged by feminists who thought it was anti-feminist and by anti-feminists who thought it was feminist. I was trying to walk a nice gray line but people who feel strongly about a subject don’t want a gray line. They want it to be all black or all white.”

Lois Duncan

On controversy over her novel Killing Mr. Griffin, interview with Megan Abbott (2011)
2003–2016

Lois Duncan Quotes about books

“Violence is a fact of life in today’s society and therefore it has its place in books and films, but I strongly believe that the people who create those books and films have a duty to treat the subject seriously and to show the terrible consequences.”

Lois Duncan

On violence in the arts, 1998 interview, reprinted in The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/08/25/lois-duncan-author-of-teenage-fiction--obituary/ (2016)
1990–2002

“The reasons for censorship reflect the social climate of the times. The publisher of Debutante Hill asked me to revise the manuscript because I had a 19-year-old boy (the ‘bad guy’) drink a beer. When I changed the beer to a Coke, the book was published and won the ‘Seventeenth Summer Literary Award.”

Lois Duncan

On censorship, interview https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130801124618/http://absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/lois_duncan.htm in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

“The subject matter of today's youth novels has no boundaries. The only taboo seems to be sex discrimination… I can only guess about where we're going, but I think we have come about as far as we can in the direction of 'let-it-all-hang-out' realism. My reader-mail indicates that kids are beginning to feel bogged down with so much depressing slice-of-life. My own most successful books have been those that were high in entertainment value, especially those touching on the supernatural.”

Lois Duncan

On literary realism, quoted in The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies (1997), p. 113
1990–2002

“The books I loved most as a child were those that contained elements of magic—the whole series of Oz books, Mary Poppins, The Princess and the Goblin—I could name them indefinitely.”

Lois Duncan

On her favorite literature as a child, quoted in The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies (1997), p. 110
1990–2002