J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

It's an important thing for children to be able to make up their own words.

Words played an important part in my growing up. Not only the written word... but words that flew through the air: jokes, riddles, puns.

I want to create a kind of new monster language for kids to play with, pick up, and incorporate into their own vocabularies.

When I was 14 years old, I was crazy about Dr. Seuss. I loved the words he made up, and I just thought, 'Well, if he can make up words, then I can make up words.'

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.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

I like that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing--that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around. They're the best moments in a day of writing -- when an image appears that you didn't know would be there when you started work in the morning.

I actually did a project with my puppet one time in fourth grade. I made up a song that went with the rhythm to a song I do now. And I had to make up a song about a penguin and research and put information in the song about a penguin. And I sang it with my duck, because I didn't have a penguin puppet, but close enough.

I was one of those kids that would take apart the remote control and take all the wheels off my little toy cars.

Writing, for me, really started in the '70s as a young child. I used to read a lot of nursery rhymes, and I learned a lot of those rhymes word for word.

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

I tried to draw and write comics when I was four. By the time I was nine, I had written my first story - about my dog, of course.

I just used to make up stories for the kids at bedtime and my wife goes, 'you should start putting that stuff down.' It's such a joy to do.

My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didn't write another black character until I was 18.

You make up a character, there's always gonna be parts of you that, like it or not, shine through.

I could never really decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, and for a while, I thought that maybe I wanted to be a writer... I've always loved to write, that form of expression.

The very first song I ever wrote was called 'I See Between The Trees,' when I was 9. It was really bad.

When I was little, I used to spend a lot of time making up stories when I was put to bed.

In elementary school, I was always writing little plays for my friends to be in. I was much more of a director than a performer.

Sometimes I turn the TV just below where you can hear it and write down what I think they might be saying by the mumbles and rhythms.

I've been reading fanfiction before I even realized what fanfiction was.

If we got writing assignments in English class to make up a story, that was when the glimmer of creativity popped out. That was way more interesting to me than writing down my life details.

I remember reading Dr. Seuss books, and he's rhyming so many words together and I just loved the way it sounded. It became a challenge for me, to put words together that nobody would ever think about putting together.

I always wanted to tell stories. From the time I had 20 cents or a quarter in my pocket, I could peddle my old Rambler 500 down to the corner store and buy comic books.