Judy Blume Quotes

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners.

I thought [books ban] was crazy. Really my thoughts were "This is America, we don't do this here" but of course I know a lot better now. And I wasn't the only one. Norma Klein was writing at the same time. Her books were going. So many of us. When you say to me, no you can't do this I say, oh yes I can.

If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.

The censors don't bother with fantasy books, especially old ones. They can't understand them. They think it's all kids' stuff. They'd die if they knew what The Chronicles of Narnia were really about.

My books for adults had been previously challenged and banned so I'd had experience with it. I always find it sad and amusing: Sad to think that such archaic and potentially dangerous censorious beliefs still exist, and amused because these censors only make a book more powerful and seductive when trying to ban it.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

If no one speaks out for [young readers], if they don’t speak out for themselves, all they’ll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. Instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object... In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced — writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices — and all because of fear.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.

Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.

Books are feeders of brothels.

Censorship has had a long history in the western world. Book banning is as old as books.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

It is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.