Drew Daywalt Quotes

Young readers are the most challenging, demanding, and rewarding of audiences. Adults often ask why I write for the younger set. My reply: 'I can't think of anyone I'd rather write for.'

When I make a book, I make it for the child and not for the parent - no jokes in it for the parents!

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

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.

When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.

Well, we certainly weren't making a cartoon show for kids. It was a completely different kind of idea.

'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to J. K. Rowling.

I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.

I feel sometimes that in children's books there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

There are six 'Time Warp Trio' books that would take a page each to fully praise. And I just thought up twelve more while I was typing this sentence.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

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.

You know, I have a deep, deep affinity for Dr. Seuss.

I've always wanted to write an early reader. When I wrote my first novel, my goal was to make it an early reader, but it grew beyond the category.

I write books for all age groups - young kids, teenagers and adults - because I get a range of different ideas.

But I don't sit down and think: this is meant for children.

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.

My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

Most of the books I remember from my childhood were Dr. Seuss-type books. They were fun to read, but there wasn't a real story behind them.

Writing for children is the toughest thing.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

'The Brownies and the Goblins' is the only book I recall from my early childhood and is the inspiration for a children's book I wrote in the 1980s titled 'The Magic Spectacles.'