Jan Brett Quotes

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

When I was a little kid, I told stories.

Kids need stuff which is different than what their life is that they can kind of live through.

Children live in a world filled with possibilities. Their thoughts roam without boundaries, like dreams – full of images, places and actions. Unlike adults, they can’t temper their imaginations with experience. So, when a child plays with a toy or reads a story, it becomes an adventure, a new reality to them.

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I'd imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week.

I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically.

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

I have a lot of respect and love for children's books.

I loved the world of imagination.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I'm telling strange tales.

From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way.

I always loved having the chance to disappear in a story. I always was kind of obsessed with that.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things.

When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.