Alexandra Adornetto Quotes

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions.

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

Kids enjoy laughing and are seldom bored when they find something funny. They also ask questions, often to adults, because they understand that the more words they can comprehend about a funny story or a joke, the more they'll enjoy it.

I always love writing about children.

It's great meeting children because you never know what they will say.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

You want to know what makes me tick, I'll tell you what makes me tick. I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn; I read a two-penny magazine called 'The Hawk's Nest.' Nobody entered that nest that didn't leave a little richer and a little wiser. And that 11-year-old boy said, 'Isn't that a wonderful thing.' And that's all there is to it.

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

The world is so different for a child, waking in the mornings, wide-eyed and ready to take it all in.

When I was three and a half years old, I heard my big sister tell my mum that at school that day all the kids sat on the floor and watched 'The Neverending Story.' Having never heard of the movie, I concluded that this was what school must be: sitting cross legged on the floor listening to a never-ending story. Page after page.

Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.

It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

Your father tells you a story when you're a kid, or your mother or your uncle or whoever it is. You sit there with your mouth open, and your mind goes to all these places they're telling you about that you've never seen, and you're agape. You just can't believe that things can happen like that - but it's just so direct.

In a way, my childhood was one long bunch of pages... I read and read and read.

When my daughter asks, 'What do you do?', every movie I have a different answer. As she grows, she wants more explanations.

We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness.

Style and entertainment tastes change, but the core emotions of being a kid - which, not coincidentally, are the core foundations of any good story - are constant.

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life.

Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

I think a lot of people also have kids to reclaim thу innocence and experience it over again. I think it's about staying curious and not losing the sense of wonder.