Judy Blume Quotes

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.

You write about what you know. It makes everything easier, and also more truthful. In this case, I grew up in Oklahoma, and I grew up in the Cherokee Nation and I'm a member of the Cherokee Tribe. Oddly enough, I know a lot about robots and Oklahoma, and so that's what comes out in my writing.

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.

I don't write anything that I hadn't experienced or hadn't been through.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I still connect with original emotions. 'Night Moves' was written about 1961 or 1962 when I was in high school, and it was about what my friends and I did in that period.

I've certainly been someone who has loved to mine the trials and tribulations of growing up in general, and the people who are in our lives, and I don't mind pulling from them and writing things down on my phone that my family says.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

You just write what you know, and I know what it's like to be a teenager in 1993,, and I'm a woman, so I'm definitely going to write from that point of view.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.

I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.

I think a handful of the roles that I've gotten to play are characters whom I've lived that are like younger versions of me but who are maybe more naive and a little bit wilder than when I was. And I've gotten to play 16 and 17 when I was a little bit older, so I got to pull from experience.