I would say, “I love you, and I am grateful to you for trying to empathize, but it’s important to understand that reading a story about coal mining does not turn you into a coal miner.”

No.

I don’t find realism very interesting. Like, I am not convinced that there even is a reality totally independent of its observer.

I write fiction, and it’s not my ambition that a reader feel like my story is a work of journalism. My hope is that readers become so emotionally invested in the story that even though they know it’s made up, it is still powerful and alive and important to them. At times, this means using realistic elements; at other times, it involves fantastical or hyper-real elements (witness having been dumped by 19 girls named Katherine, for example).

I didn’t really talk to parents of teenagers except in the sense that I am always talking to people and trying to listen to them so that I can steal from them. But I was a teenager who had parents, so that’s something.

I wasn’t really conscious of what Hazel’s mom did and didn’t know about her relationship with Gus. When I was writing, I felt very narrowly inside of Hazel’s head, and in my mind at least, it would never occur to her that her mom would have that side of things figured out. (Of course, Hazel does frequently underestimate her mom.)

Yes. Peter Van Houten is right when he says that some infinities are bigger than other infinities, but Hazel is wrong when she concludes from this that the infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2 is larger than the infinite set between 0 and 1.

(The reasons for this are extremely complicated, but, for instance, the infinite set of real numbers is larger than the infinite set of natural numbers. Georg Cantor proved this in the 19th century with one of the most famously elegant proofs in mathematics. To give you a sense of how big a deal this was, the mathematician David Hilbert once remarked, “No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created it.”)

Most authors don’t have a ton of say in their covers (and I certainly don’t internationally), but I did have a lot of say in this cover, and I was very happy with the cover that Rodrigo Corral designed. It’s abstract, visually striking, and not easily defined, which is what I wanted.

I don’t think there’s any kind of literal connection. (I mean, it plays with the Venn diagram jokes.) But the black and the white clouds play on Gus’s fascination with the intertwining shadows of the branches in Amsterdam, and I think the metaphor there is big and important and nicely visually expressed without it seeming like a Metaphor.

Plus I find it really clean and minimalist and pretty.

Yeah, The Price of Dawn series is interminable. I think this is one of the things we like about book series, and also about “tentpole franchises” like Spiderman and James Bond: The story is infinite, and survival guaranteed, in a way that is precisely the opposite of the actual world in which we find ourselves.

Hazel says at one point about The Price of Dawn, “It was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.” Like, there was a lot that I liked about The Babysitters’ Club as a kid, but my favorite thing about it was that they never ended.

 I was just making fun of my parents and their house, mostly. (Almost all the Encouragements come word-for-word from my parents’ house.)

That said, I don’t think we should dismiss Encouragements, and I certainly wanted TFiOS to be, in its way, an Encouragement.

That was like the only complimentary thing that girls ever said about guys when I was growing up, and it always fascinated me that a defined jawline would be somehow associated with Appropriate Mating Material.

I was using phalanx in the bone sense; I imagined that the people marketing phalanxifor imagined it as having these little fingers that go in and unlock/kill cancer cells.

Also it just sounded like a drug to me. (Phalanxifor is fictional, but it’s kinda based on some ways on Herceptin.)

No. I had Hazel say that because I wanted to establish early in the book that Hazel does not buy into the notion that sacrifice and grand heroic gestures are the best model of a well-lived life. (Hazel and Augustus disagree about this throughout the book, even at the very end, although they eventually acknowledge in small ways the legitimacy of the other’s worldview.) Hazel’s initial idea that this notion of heroic sacrifice is a “boy” thing eventually goes away, but I figured that would be a nice way to introduce it, because there is something traditionally masculine about that idea of heroism, whether you’re talking about Odysseus or Romeo.

No, not at all. There’s no right way to feel when reading a book. I wanted to muddle those emotions—the joking moment of the egging of Monica’s car followed by the line from Hazel about how she never took another picture of him, for instance—because they’re all muddled together in life (or at least in my experience of life) and they don’t follow like a traditional emotional arc.

(This is a stupid example of what I mean, but I remember for instance the first time my college girlfriend and I exchanged I-love-yous, the same day my computer died with all these sorely needed files on it. And this magical day became the worst day ever, except that I was still really happy, except that I also really needed that paper about Toni Morrison, etc.)

It seems like this will be the biggest obstacle the book faces in terms of reaching new readers. A lot of people (myself included) don’t like to read sad books that will make them cry. They figure, not wrongly, that there is plenty of sadness and crying in real life.

This is why I advocate the “If you don’t like this book, you can punch me in the stomach” tactic for sharing The Fault in Our Stars with your friends.

Well, I think Augustus is pretty smart, and he does not present an atheistic worldview (or at least an inherently atheistic worldview), nor does Hazel’s pretty smart dad, whose argument about the universe wanting to be noticed perpetually is a very theistic/faith-based/spiritual kind of thing to say. (Like, embracing even the possibility of concepts like forever or consciousness that survives death is impossible in a rigidly atheistic worldview.)

Augustus’s parents, who I think are also pretty smart but perhaps not in the ostentatious way that Hazel and Augustus are, are clearly religious people.

And the last words of the book represent a moment where the author himself perhaps interjects his own let-us-not-deem-consciousness-temporary-just-quite-yet with the present tense marriage vows that could be read as a statement about celestial marriage or a marriage that survives death or etc. if you wanted to read it that way.

Sure.

The Dutch Tulip Man. :)

I don’t think of story and symbols as separate, really. They emerge from the same place, a desire to go on a journey with the reader that will be interesting (and hopefully helpful) to both of us. So I don’t sit down and say, like, “Green will be the color of all the dreams we were foolish to dream,” or anything like that, because then I think it usually ends up seeming clunky and obvious and inauthentic.

The truth is that metaphor and symbol are all around us, and that we are constantly reading our lives and the world symbolically. I want figurative language and symbols to be as deeply integrated into the story as they are into our lives.

I save every draft of the novel as a different file name (there are several hundred file names related to TFiOS). So it’s possible to chart the edits and rewrites of the novel over time, but the book I published is the only one I want to publish and I’m not inclined to show off all the terrible sentences I wrote before writing the (hopefully not terrible) sentences that ended up in the book.

However, all this stuff will go to a university library when I die, so if you are really inclined, and you outlive me, you can view it eventually.

I feel bad that I can’t answer more of them, but I never feel anything except lucky to have readers who read my books with such care and thoughtfulness.

That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what Salinger called reading and running—like, I don’t think that critical analysis or whatever is the only reason we read fiction or the only enjoyable thing about reading (or writing) fiction.

There are plenty of ways to read a book, and I’m grateful to anyone who finds my work encouraging or useful.

Oh, Oskar is overwhelmingly wrong. (In his defense, I think he is like nine years old in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.) It’s a nice moment in that book, when he imagines that there aren’t enough skulls for everyone alive to play Hamlet, but yeah, that’s just total horseshit. There are plenty of skulls. We could all have freaking juggling acts with all the skulls.

Yes, Isaac, because it would have fit in nicely with how epics usually work, complete with being told by a blind guy. But in the end I wanted to give Hazel the voice of her own story, particularly since that is so often denied the dying. (We read about them a lot more than we read them.)