Nikki Grimes Quotes

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.

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

You can't write if you don't read.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

'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.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.

Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine!

I know that when I watch TV, I want to be transformed and transported, not just by the characters that I grow to love over the hours and seasons of watching but also the world that it plants me into.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Ultimately, Lloyd Alexander's tales of Prydain were enough to make me come back and visit again and again, and each time, I laughed and I wept. Each time. No exceptions.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

You cannot reduce the power of story with the tag of money because it's not a share market. So you must know the seriousness of the power of storytelling.

Sometimes when it comes to the iconic kind of moments, when I read the script for the first time, you get little goose bumps or something because it really is kind of exciting.

Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.