Rodman Philbrick Quotes

I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.

I think the secret to what Jim Henson did, ultimately, is that he understood how to cut through to the... I know this sounds corny... but the child inside of you.

I love fantasy; I love imagination - that's the inner child in me.

I loved everything about being ten, eleven, and twelve years old, and seem to make most of my heroines and heroes that age so I can reexperience all those pitfalls and wonderful discoveries. It helps me to figure out my own life when I write from that eleven year old place!

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

We've all been disappointed by new installments of the stories we love. But with all this talk of filmmakers 'ruining our childhood,' we forget that right now is someone else's childhood. This is their time. And I have to build something that can take them to the same place those earlier films took us.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

Every time I see a good play or watch a good movie, I have the same feeling I had as a child of wanting to be that person on stage or wanting to run through the forest with a big dress on.

'The Secret Garden' was the first musical that I fell in love with when I was a kid. My mom took me to see it, and it was the first one that I owned the soundtrack to and listened to over and over again.

Every western I did and will do; I will do it for the never ending young kid inside of me.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

It's so important and easy to be a kid at heart.

I'm still very much a kid inside myself.

Ever since I was a little kid, I used to love doing the evil laugh: 'Mwahaha!' I could really do it! And there's a little bit of that inside everybody. Still, as a kid, it was like my favorite thing.

I've never outgrown my childhood.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

Sometimes I think I am still that 5-year-old girl playing with her dogs in the yard. That's how I see myself.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.

Writing is a solitary endeavor, but not a lonely one. When you write, your world is populated by the characters you invent, and you feel those people filling your life.