Ellen Hopkins Quotes

I could help a lot of people's kids that are going through racism or getting bullied. That's what I wanna do.

Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them

I’m not saying we had a playroom, but I’m not shocked by the sex in the book. It’s essential to tell the story. I can’t believe films that don’t invoke a sexual side of it. So it works for me.

We've fallen down on our responsibility to our children by somehow creating this world where they're surrounded by images of sexuality; and yet, we as adults struggle to talk to kids honestly about sex, the rules of dignity and consent.

They asked me what I thought about euthanasia. I said I'm more concerned about the adults.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.

And if I could get the mayors, and the governors, and the president to look into the eyes of the five-year-olds of this nation, dressed in old raggedy clothes, whose zippers are broken but whose dreams are still alive, they would know what I know-that children need people to fight for them. To stand with them on the most dangerous streets, in the dirtiest hallways, in their darkest hours.

You don’t play around with the lives of children.

I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.

I believe that UNICEF is the most important branch of the U.N.; they do exceptional work to help the neediest children around the world

I believe a lot of people that are gay, had even had problems like I had in the past. I think they've been hurt by somebody from the opposite sex, and they don't know how to function right in those relationships.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

I don't believe that sex with 13-year-olds is okay.

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.

My parents are pretty liberal. But they were just you know trying to look out for my innocence or whatever. But my babysitter had "Forever" [by Judy Blume]. And I said "Well I've read Judy Blume books, can I borrow that?" And she said no, this one's not appropriate for you. Which obviously, got me really worked up. So I took it.

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean.

We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.

There's a part of me with every book that thinks, What would it have meant for me tohave had this book when I was a kid? I decided to create a book for girls like me. The Littlest Bigfoot is about bullying and body image and girls who don't fit in. It's like training wheels for my adult books - like Sex and the City, but with 12-year-olds.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

UNICEF is successfully giving children and young people all over the world opportunities and hope. Just like the ones we met on the Long Way Down - protecting them from exploitation and giving them chances in life.