I think that the truth is always hopeful, so maybe that's something that I have in common with them. "I mean, I think that optimism is honest and I think that nihilism is inherently dishonest. "A lot of people sort of dismiss, particularly they think of this generation of young people as being disinterested in the world and being distracted by technology and living these lives of sort of mere distraction, and that's not been my experience at all." So I guess I kind of wanted to go back there and relive some of my favorite parts of those friendships, but also acknowledge the fact that they do change, I mean it does change when you graduate from high school, and things are going to be different and there are going to be some lasts involved in that leaving." And that was really hard for me to imagine and hard for me to reconcile myself to. For me, the end of high school was a really important time in my life and the closest friends that I had, those were the people who helped me to understand the world around me, and I wasn't going to be with them everyday anymore. "I think all those times in life that are beginning times and ending times, times of firsts and lasts, are really interesting to write about and really fun to write about. And so that's what I really wanted this story to be about, Q's journey toward trying to understand Margot more complexly, rather than just seeing her as the person that he projects his own ideas onto." "The great challenge of adulthood is imagining other people complexly and understanding that their grief and joy and suffering is as real as our own. But of course it's really dehumanizing to see someone as more than a person, and it proves in the end, I think, really destructive to everyone involved." "For me the book started with my thinking of my own high school experience and the way that I looked at girls that I liked, and a lot of times I idealized them and put them on a pedestal and romanticized them, and sort of thought that was what you're supposed to do, I thought that was how the male gaze was supposed to work.
"I try to take teenagers seriously and credit them with the intelligence and curiosity that I've seen in them, and that I remember from my own adolescence," he said. The New Yorker has called Green "the teen whisperer" because of the huge following he's amassed through his video blogs and bestselling books like " The Fault in Our Stars."īut as Green told Here & Now's Meghna Chakrabarti, he's not sure why his work appeals to teens, but he hopes they respond to it. " Paper Towns," the film based on the young adult novel by John Green, opens in theaters tomorrow. (Joel Ryan/Invision/AP) This article is more than 6 years old. Author John Green poses for photographers at the photo call for the film Paper Towns in Claridges, central London, Thursday, 18 June, 2015.