Catherine Jinks Quotes

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.

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.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

My novels are all ideas.

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.

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 have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.

As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.

One of the things I would like to do is make up stories that I would have enjoyed when I was a kid. So, if I'm thinking about an audience, it's usually a younger version of myself.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book.

I started to read at a very early age, and I just thought that books and reading were really the most wonderful thing that life had to offer. I think I wrote my very first piece of fiction at the age of 12, but then I didn't write any more for quite a long time.

I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they're ready to go.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I am constantly thinking of different ideas and formats for TV shows. I am in a place where anything is possible if you want to do it.