Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I think Judy Blume, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz are the three authors responsible for my being where I am today. I owe them a lot.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary's funny and wonderful books.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

I liked the idea of being a writer more than I liked the idea of writing.

I don't think in genres. Once I get a germ of an idea I wait for it to die! And if it refuses to die and keeps coming back, I start thinking more about it. Then come the world and the characters. I wait to get bored and if I don't get bored- then I start building on them.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.

I'm inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it's a film or a book or whatever.

People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people's lives. I'd always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That's who I want to be.

I've been influenced by so many different writers along the way - from Charles Dickens, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, John D. McDonald, and so many others - that it would take a page or two to list them all.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

I started writing stories at a young age, but not once did it occur to me that I could grow up to be a writer. Who could I look to? My favorite authors were Ann M. Martin and E.L. Konigsburg and Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary and Lois Lowry and Norma Klein. They were all white women, and they seemed so stately to me, so elegant. A whole world away.