Top 100 Quotes About Children Writing
#1. There's nothing funnier than getting a death threat via MySpace. Why don't you just write it in a children's birthday card.
Doug Stanhope
#2. Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don't have the fucking part in writing a book.
M.F. Moonzajer
#3. I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.
Colson Whitehead
#4. Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories.
Pam Allyn
#5. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.
Billy Bob Thornton
#6. If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
Anita Brookner
#7. April, like a child,
Writes hieroglyphs on dust with flowers,
Wipes them away and forgets.
Rabindranath Tagore
#9. If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.
Dorothy Allison
#10. Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child
Nachman Of Breslov
#11. Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.
Margaret Mahy
#12. [Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.
Lionel Shriver
#13. How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.
Joyce Carol Oates
#14. I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.
A.A. Milne
#15. An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.
Richard Mitchell
#16. I don't think about age groups when I write, although I think if I know I'm writing for Children I'll be a bit more ambitious, and think more about every word, because I know that they pay closer attention when they read than adults do.
Neil Gaiman
#17. Sometimes you have no idea what you are you doing, but you just do it anyways. And that can be a good thing
Anita Babic
#18. To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.
Vicki Baum
#19. What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.
Elizabeth Moon
#20. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.
Madeleine L'Engle
#21. Invention comes about when we let it, when we don't mind feeling stupid as we do it - it feels like what children do, it is what children do - when we clear a place for it, become quiet, and wait.
Alice Mattison
#22. Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
Susan Orlean
#23. I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults.
Margaret Mahy
#24. I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.
Marina Keegan
#25. Our parents are the coolest parents ever. No other generation went on from writing letters to their own parents to sending snapchats to their own kids.
Sharad Vivek Sagar
#26. Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.
Nina Bawden
#27. I love acting, but directing and writing have always been just as important. I started to write so many things when I was even a child. I wrote my first play when I was, like, seven years old. That was me - a writer - for years.
Melanie Laurent
#28. More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.
Sonya Hartnett
#29. The embryo of my second novel, Bobby's Diner, came to life because of my husband's ex-wives. Let's just say, they inspired the writing.
Susan Wingate
#31. Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way ... Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.'
James Hillman
#32. In the early stages of writing children's books, an experienced lady editor said that while girls read boys' books, the converse was not true, and I may have been influenced by that.
John Christopher
#33. Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
P.L. Travers
#34. I personally believe that the writing of personal and family histories will do more to turn the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to children than almost anything we can do
Hartman Rector Jr.
#35. Fate is a story that's been written for you by somebody else. By your parent's genes, by what happened to you when you were a child, by your culture, by the fact that you were born a man or a woman. Destiny is a story that you write.
Alberto Villoldo
#36. Erudition - that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic - is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.
Robert Baden-Powell
#37. Write hand-written notes daily and commit to supporting the growth and self-esteem of children, because it makes such a big difference in terms of their capacity for learning.
Debra Messing
#38. Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.
Richard Dawkins
#39. I used to think when I had children that somebody else had the rule book and they hadn't given it to me, and everybody else knew how to do it right except me. I find the same thing in writing: you think that everybody knows what they're doing and that you don't.
Danielle Steel
#40. The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.
Mem Fox
#41. Writing for young readers is almost like dipping into a fountain of youth; for hours a day, I am a child again.
Iain Lawrence
#42. I can't conceive of nursing babies and taking care of children and writing, too. I know there are writers that do that, but I'm too single-minded. I can't stand to be interrupted, whether I'm writing a story or dressing a child.
Ellen Gilchrist
#43. Writing is praying with me. You know a child would look up at every sentence and say, 'And what shall I say next?' That is just what I do; I ask Him that at every line He would give me not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes.
Frances Ridley Havergal
#44. Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?
Sylvia Plath
#45. I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.
Rick Riordan
#46. Life is but one continual course of instruction. The hand of the parent writes on the heart of the child the first faint characters which time deepens into strength so that nothing can efface them.
Paul R. Hill
#47. I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc ... to find success writing children's novels.
Brian Jacques
#48. I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
Ellen Potter
#49. Children live in a way that is very generous. They learn from a young age what you value; they watch your every move. If you value writing, they will learn quickly to value it too, as something they can give to someone, or receive with pleasure from someone else.
Pam Allyn
#50. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
Philip Pullman
#51. I am writing a book entitled "Conquest." Please be ready. It is a book children should red.
Charles Keith Hardman
#52. When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets ... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.
Jack Prelutsky
#53. Write it down and remember that we never gave in, the mind of a child is where the revolution begins, so if the solution has never been to look in yourself, how is it that you expect to find it anywhere else
Immortal Technique
#54. I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.
Julian Barnes
#55. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#56. When writing for children, it's important to keep in touch with our own inner child. What frightened them, made them happy, made them sad or angry?
C.J. Heck
#57. As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house ... Those stories led me to my writing.
Markus Zusak
#58. I love being an author. I love actual writing, and I love communicating with children. And it keeps me young.
Eve Bunting
#59. My books are inspired by children - sometimes my own.
My writing is powered by chocolate - not always my own!
Cas Lester
#60. I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.
J.K. Rowling
#61. Idea of the generations continuing is really important. And that's interesting to me. I write about families; I'm interested in families. Even though I think a family can be just two people or two people and a dog, I really wanted children for that reason.
Jennifer Gilmore
#62. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#63. If you are writing children's books, you need to be a ruthless killer.
J.K. Rowling
#64. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
Toni Morrison
#65. Writing stories has given me the power to change things I could not change as a child. I can make boys into doctors. I can make fathers stop drinking. I can make mothers stay.
Cynthia Rylant
#66. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?
Steven Kotler
#67. I don't believe in condescending to children. I don't change any writing technique.
Stephen Schwartz
#68. I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.
Laurence Yep
#69. Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
E.B. White
#70. I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
Lynne Reid Banks
#71. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
#72. Never give advice to your children unless you have it in writing and notarized.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#73. I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind.
Lisa Papademetriou
#74. I actually have two children now, and sometimes I wonder if that's it. Because they do make writing and directing more complicated and more difficult, especially now that they're very young.
Diablo Cody
#75. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.
Aaron Shepard
#76. The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.
Dara Horn
#77. I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.
Jane Yolen
#78. Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
Enid Blyton
#79. There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention.
Michael Scott
#80. Writing should be meaningful for children, Y an intrinsic need should be aroused in them, and Y writing should be incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant.
Lev S. Vygotsky
#81. ...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about their writing work each day, catching them in the act [of writing].
Katie Wood Ray
#82. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.
Jodi Picoult
#83. I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
Mal Peet
#84. In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
Jonathan Kozol
#85. There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
Andrew Solomon
#86. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#87. I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
Anne Tyler
#88. Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.
Dean Bakopoulos
#89. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.
Stephen King
#90. I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
Al Yankovic
#91. If the traditional Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are the basics that we want our children to master academically, then reverence, respect, and responsibility are the three Rs that our children need to master for the sake of their souls and the health of the world.
Zoe Weil
#92. And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!
David Almond
#93. Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
Helen Dunmore
#94. Why bring children into a world where no one writes letters?
Judith Martin
#95. Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).
Sandra Scarr
#96. Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."
Olga Masters
#97. It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler
#98. I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.
Mahatma Gandhi
#99. I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.
Sonya Hartnett
#100. I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve!
Catharine Sedgwick
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