Maurice Sendak Quotes

Young readers are the most challenging, demanding, and rewarding of audiences. Adults often ask why I write for the younger set. My reply: 'I can't think of anyone I'd rather write for.'

And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

I didn't want to do 'The Fluffy Puppy Learns to Hold Hands!' or 'Kitty Gets a Box to Play In!' There's a place for that for the little ones - some kids need that stuff. But I'm too dark and sarcastic.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

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

When I make a book, I make it for the child and not for the parent - no jokes in it for the parents!

Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.

I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.

I think probably you can either write for kids, or you can't. That ability to imaginatively be a child and see the world as a child and feel and think like a child - you either have that ability or you don't.

There are six 'Time Warp Trio' books that would take a page each to fully praise. And I just thought up twelve more while I was typing this sentence.

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.

I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.

I've always wanted to write an early reader. When I wrote my first novel, my goal was to make it an early reader, but it grew beyond the category.

Anyone who says that writing for children or teens is easier than writing for adults has never tried it, because they are so much more critical than adults. You cannot get anything past them.

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

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

All I care about really is writing something worthwhile for children, something that will engage them in some way and stimulates in them a sense of wonder.

On the craft level, writing for children is not so different from writing for adults. You still have to have a story that moves forward. You still have to have the tools of the trade down. The difference arises in the knowledge of who you're writing for. This isn't necessary true of writing for adults.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

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.