Garth Nix Quotes

When doing family entertainment, you don't actually worry about kids. You know what you can't do. But in terms of sensibility and sophistication and wit and ambition, aim for your own taste level, and kids will - if they're interested in the subject matter - be glad that you did.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

At times, parents foist their own choices on kids and try to get them to read the classics. But kids have very high filters and don't take to it. At other times, parents simply don't know what books to select for their children and end up giving books that aren't appropriate.

Children's authors don't talk down or patronise their younger readers.

In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.

The things kids can do on screens can be really delightful - if they are age appropriate. But no, they shouldn't spend all their time on a screen; they should split up their time doing multiple, different things.

Putting lessons in young adult books is very dangerous.

I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.

Being a lazy parent and letting your kid watch stuff that's not appropriate for their age is one of the bigger mistakes you can make.

The world is filled with terrible things that can influence children, and movies have depicted them since time immemorial. Should every terrible thing warrant an R-rating?

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read 'Peter Rabbit,' I skip the part about Peter's father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. I also hid the book of 'Grimm Fairy Tales.' They're just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.

My kids love anime, but I don't show them the really graphic stuff.

I think that children's books should be censored not for references to sex but for references to diseases. I mean, who didn't think after reading 'Madeline' that they were going to get appendicitis?

I like to protect children. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having adult programming for mature adults that can selectively decide what they want to watch and what they don't want to watch.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

To some extent, at least, you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.

My children can't see many of the films that I've been in because I'm always either dying or taking my clothes off.

Now that I have kids, I want my kids to appreciate my music, but at the same time, I don't want to teach them anything that they shouldn't know just yet.

My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

If a film is suitable for family viewing, it should remain so, and if a film has some adult content, it should remain so, and these genres should never be mixed and spoil the vision of the story teller.

I'm not sure I like making movies that my kids can't go to, but that's just how it is.

I would be concerned if one of my children were constantly watching nothing but horror films or indulging in gothic literature without the balance of other types of art and entertainment. I do think that's a danger.

Let children come across good as well as bad things. MTV is unnecessarily criticised for dishing out obscenity.