Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Cormier

Cormier’s line is a polite refusal to play the publishing industry’s favorite parlor game: deciding what a “young reader” can handle. He’s not posturing as above categories so much as puncturing them. By insisting on “an intelligent reader,” he replaces age with agency. The compliment embedded in the phrasing is doing real work: it grants teenagers (his most contested audience) the dignity of being taken seriously, while also warning adults that condescension won’t be part of the bargain.

The subtext is unmistakably Cormier: intelligence doesn’t correlate with innocence, and moral complexity isn’t a gated community for the grown. His novels - often shelved as YA, frequently argued over for their darkness - thrive on that premise. He wrote in an era when “problem novels” and school-library battles were intensifying, and his work kept getting treated like a public health question: will this harm kids? The quote flips the anxiety back on the gatekeepers. If you’re worried, maybe it’s not the reader’s age you distrust; maybe it’s their capacity to recognize how power actually works.

There’s also craft pragmatism here. Writing “for teens” can tempt authors into explanatory dialogue, softened consequences, moral signage. Cormier’s stance protects ambiguity, the engine of his fiction. By declining to imagine a demographic, he imagines a mind - alert, skeptical, willing to sit with discomfort - and that’s why his books land with the particular sting of truth rather than the padded reassurance of “appropriate.”