D. J. MacHale

"Any screenwriter will tell you that as satisfying and wonderful a career as that is, outside of the people you work with, nobody actually reads what you write. Your writing goes through a process, touched by multiple dozens of people, until it becomes a finished piece of film. As an example on a very simple level, you may write a line of dialog that you absolutely love, but an actor had to speak that line, and music might be there to underscore the line, and the line might be read in a situation where a dozen other things are happening simultaneously. It's all good and the way it is supposed to work, but the overall experience becomes about so much more than the line itself. Writing a book is much more pure than that, and I wanted to experience it."

"The thing is, kids love scary stories. They love dramatic stories. They love that kind of stuff. It’s one of the reasons why I write books now. I’m able to write the kind of stuff I like, whereas in TV I can’t do that anymore."

"I rarely take the characteristics of someone I know and make them a complete fictional character, except maybe with truly minor characters who only play a small role. All of my characters are more like the Frankenstein monster, having been stitched together using multiple real people. The classic advice to any writer is "write what you know". So in order to create believable characters, you have to write about people you know."

"There was no interference, nothing on a creative level, you have the idea, you go for it. And that's what it was like with all the shows made back then, it was that attitude that really created Nickelodeon and made the show as good as it was."

"A script is only the beginning of the process. But with books, what you write is exactly what people read. So as a writer, that's very satisfying."