Top 100 Writing For Children Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
Enid Blyton
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Anyone who says that writing for children or teens is easier than writing for adults has never tried it, because they are so much more critical than adults. You cannot get anything past them.
Margaret Stohl
#12. Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words.
Mo Willems
#13. 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
#14. Writing for children hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, but nine years of teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
#15. When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
Mark Haddon
#16. I like writing for children because they are not prejudiced against magic.
J.P. Hightman
#17. 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
#18. '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
#19. Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.
Dr. Seuss
#20. 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
#21. Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.
Garth Nix
#22. Writing for children isn't easy. Kids will abandon a story that doesn't interest, enchant, delight, thrill, or terrify them. But when you can find a way into a young reader's imagination through something as simple as words on paper, well, there's nothing more satisfying.
Kate Klise
#23. I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.
Robin Hobb
#24. And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.
Rick Riordan
#25. 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
#26. I am writing a book entitled "Conquest." Please be ready. It is a book children should red.
Charles Keith Hardman
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Writing for young readers is almost like dipping into a fountain of youth; for hours a day, I am a child again.
Iain Lawrence
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.
Richard Ford
#57. There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Alan Jay Lerner
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. They wanted to manipulate our songs - our fantastic, well-written songs with a soulful drive - beautiful English R&B - and turn them into pop rubbish. We might as well have been writing children's lullabies for all that did for me. We had to get away from that asshole.
Diane Rinella
#61. Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?
Diane Samuels
#62. Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?
Richard Dawkins
#63. I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.
Ann Packer
#64. I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way to say what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussion and writing assignments.
Marva Collins
#65. I love to talk with children. I try to visit schools but it's hard for me to travel when I'm trying to write. Some authors are able to do both.
Judy Blume
#66. My interest in the theater led me to my first writing experience as an adult. My husband David wrote the music and lyrics and I wrote the book for a children's musical, 'Spacenapped' that was produced by a neighborhood theater in Brooklyn.
Gail Carson Levine
#67. My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?
Gary Shteyngart
#68. If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.
Don Roff
#69. 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
#70. I can always track my career by the children - I started writing right after the 14-year-old was born, and sold my first book just in time to pay for the birth of the 12-year-old.
Heather Graham Pozzessere
#71. When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.
Stephen King
#72. 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
#73. One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline ... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Anne Lamott
#74. 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
#75. I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it.
Orhan Pamuk
#76. Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#77. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
#78. My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!
Christy Hall
#79. It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.
Adam Mansbach
#80. Most people don't know me, that is why they write such things in wich most is not true. I cry very very often because it hurts and I worry about the children, all my children all over the world, I live for them.
Michael Jackson
#81. Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Jack Prelutsky
#82. 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
#83. The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
James Fenton
#84. How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it
Maurice Sendak
#85. 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
#86. Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
#87. I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
Erica Jong
#88. Most new writers think it's easy to write for children, but it's not. You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story, write well, not be condescending-all in a few pages.
Andrea Brown
#89. 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
#90. Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
Margaret Atwood
#91. Gratitude isn't just a feeling, it's an action. Expressing gratitude by writing in a journal, taking a photo, or shooting a video creates a lasting impression that can bring more gratitude into the world-for children and adults.
Janice Kaplan
#92. If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth
Madeleine L'Engle
#93. Over and over again women and men ... come to me saying, I don't know enough to write a book for adults, and so I'd like to try a book for children. And I tell them that when they have learned enough to write for an adult perhaps a child will listen to them.
Mabel Robinson
#94. I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.
Marlee Matlin
#95. I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.
Toby Jones
#96. I write my stories for my children, the best fan club a writer could ever have. They keep me writing and make it fun.
Alan W. Harris
#97. For years, there was no man in the house when my husband was off on law cases in the Far East. Without writing, I would have been bored and unfaithful, maybe both, and the children would have been hideously over-protected.
Jane Gardam
#98. When you write for children, don't write for children.
Write from the child in you.
Charles Ghigna
#99. 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
#100. After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
Barbara W. Tuchman
