Top 62 Quotes About Writing Children's Books
#1. Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
Helen Dunmore
#2. If you are writing children's books, you need to be a ruthless killer.
J.K. Rowling
#3. I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably ... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
Dr. Seuss
#4. I keep writing children's books, I keep making children's books, because I still have them inside of me.
Oliver Jeffers
#5. I'm not putting my faith or life in anyone's hands. All that ever got me was screwed, and my ass is currently sore from it. (Wren)
Nice imagery there, tiger. Graphic. Ever think of writing children's books? (Fury)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#6. The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page ... Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger.
Jerry West
#7. I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old.
Patricia Polacco
#8. My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.
Dav Pilkey
#9. I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.
Mary Pope Osborne
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I think what makes good children's books is putting the same care and effort into it as if I was writing for adults. I don't write anything - put anything in my books - that I'd be embarrassed to put in an adult book.
Louis Sachar
#13. I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.
Margaret Wise Brown
#14. The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?
Bruce Chatwin
#15. I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.
Maurice Sendak
#16. I was inspired to write children's books, but without blood and gore.
Stanley Williams
#17. My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.
Michael Ian Black
#19. Authors ... keep writing those great books for children and teens. It's a proven fact that those children & teens who read are less depressed than those who don't.
Timothy Pina
#20. 'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.
Rick Riordan
#21. Writing for children is important to me because I want children to develop the same love of books I had as a child.
Darlene Foster
#22. Books are like your children. They take nine months to write; the manuscript weighs six pounds and ... you send them out into the world and hope that some day they'll send back money.
Edna Buchanan
#23. There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.
Richard Scarry
#24. I still retain a bit of a child's focus on things, so we [with my sister] figure if we're going to write books, our best shot is to write children's books, because we relate pretty readily on that level.
Bob Weir
#25. Writing for children can be completely honest in non-cynical ways. In adult books you're required to be cynical. It embarrasses us to say positive things. You can have affection and hope in children's books, but that is out of fashion in adult fiction.
Lloyd Alexander
#26. It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.
L.M. Montgomery
#27. People think, Hey, I love kids, I want to write children's books. But they think children are happy. That's their first mistake. [Messinger, Jonathan. "Guilt for dinner: The Mo Willems interview." Hipsqueak. 5 May 2011. Web. 18 November 2011.]
Mo Willems
#28. First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
Zadie Smith
#30. But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.
Madeleine L'Engle
#31. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Madeleine L'Engle
#33. Messages are the death of an honest literary transaction with children
Maurice Sendak
#34. After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy ... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.
Iris Johansen
#35. I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.
Alan Hollinghurst
#36. I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.
Nina Bawden
#37. I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn't be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.
John Boyne
#38. 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
#39. My books are inspired by children - sometimes my own.
My writing is powered by chocolate - not always my own!
Cas Lester
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. [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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. There's a variety and depth to the song topics I get to write about in children's music and books: being able to write about things I wouldn't normally write about, like a disappointing pancake, or monsters or opposite day is really different than writing about heartbreak and relationships.
Lisa Loeb
#50. I will always respect the beliefs of fellow Christians who aren't comfortable reading or writing explicit love scenes, but I believe romances are beautiful and spiritual books that celebrate the best of what love has to offer and mirror the love God has for his children.
Teresa Medeiros
#51. I didn't write with a target audience in mind. What excited me was how much I would enjoy writing about Harry. I never thought about writing for children - children's books chose me. I think if it is a good book anyone will read it.
J.K. Rowling
#52. There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books.
Garth Nix
#53. I guess I never grew up. I was still reading kids' books in high school and college. I was always interested in writing or illustrating children's books, and I started collecting out-of-print books when I was about 10 years old.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#54. The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever
they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.
Sid Fleischman
#55. It's the witching hour once more-
When the Muse comes out to play.
He calls me through that magic door-
Where galaxies of worlds await!
Belle Whittington
#56. It seems to me that not only the writing in most children's books condescends to kids, but so does the art. I don't want to do that.
Chris Van Allsburg
#57. The table was covered with food like roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast turkey, roast liquorice and, the centrepiece, a roasted knight.
Elias Zapple
#58. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#59. If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.
Don Roff
#60. I had been writing comic books for years and I was doing them to please a publisher, who felt that comics are only read by very young children or stupid adults. And therefore, we have to keep the stories very simplistic. And that was the thing I hated.
Stan Lee
#61. I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
Mark Haddon
#62. Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
Mark Haddon
