Al Yankovic Quotes

I don't write for children. I write and someone says it's for children.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

If I don't know who I'm writing for, I make it up and pick somebody I'm writing for. That's really the only way to do it.

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

People think children's books are about teddy bears and little flowers. I realize people sometimes don't know what to do with my books because they say, 'Is it a children's book, and what age group?'

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

I don't think I would ever inch my way up to Y.A. That audience is very well served. There are a lot of wonderful writers writing for Y.A. I feel like I'm in the right place.

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

Now I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.

I wrote 'I'm Me' because I was asked to write a children's book.

For me, writing for younger audiences and writing for adults uses two different halves of my brain.

I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

I think there's only one reason to write in any genre or to any particular age group: You are called to it. You think it'd be fun.

I've never written specifically for children as such. I write to please myself, and if it is suitable, it gets printed as a children's book.

I don't write to create performance material; I write to make books.

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

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