Helena Bonham Carter Quotes

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

My job is not to frighten children, but sometimes addressing fears and concerns within the safe boundaries of a picture book can fill me with an awesome responsibility to be as truthful and transparent as possible.

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.

Even though I have this solid career in picture books, I've not only been thinking about kids - because I don't think that much about children; I'm not a child educator; I'm just a former child.

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.

I create books for six-year-olds. I don't know why that time of my life was so important to me, but no matter what I draw, it always looks like it comes from a children's book. I can't resist. I'll set out to paint a serious picture then think, "Well, maybe there would be a little bunny in that corner."

Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.

I'm not writing to make anyone's children feel safe.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.

I don't really read children's books or deal with children's books, so I don't have any relationship with them other than my own.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.

When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.

What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.

There's the excitement of adding color, which I didn't know anything about until 1997 or so, when I did my first picture book. So, the kid's book in particular have been exciting for me because it forced me to go back to the work I loved as a young boy reading Sunday's supplements and comics in the Sunday papers when I was six, seven, eight, nine. And number of which have been in wonderful collections, beautifully reproduced.

The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

I first told the idea to an editor I had met who, after reading one of my novels for adults that was set in a high school, had an idea that I might write something for children.

It feels to me like everyone is going to do their best work when they feel emotionally safe.

Adults are interested if you don't play down to the little 2 or 3 year olds or talk down. I don't believe in talking down to children. I don't believe in talking down to any certain segment. I like to kind of just talk in a general way to the audience. Children are always reaching.

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

As a child, I had a lot of older gay men taking care of me. There's a trust there. I feel like little girls and old gay men together - there's a safety. They make a shield from all of the bad things they've experienced in the world. They make a home together. There are no songs about that. I don't know if you remember, but there was a show a long time ago called 'Love, Sidney.'