Arthur Ransome Quotes

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

I think there's only one reason to write in any genre or to any particular age group: You are called to it. You think it'd be fun.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.

I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

I mean, I don't write for kids.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

If you are writing children's books, you need to be a ruthless killer.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.

My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

It's such a wonderful feeling to watch a child discover that reading is a marvelous adventure rather than a chore. I know that many writers for children say they do not write specifically with a child audience in mind ... This isn't true for me. I am very aware of my audience. Sometimes I can almost see them out there reacting as I write. Sometimes I think, 'Oh, you're going to like this part.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

So in that way, fame has become a weirder thing to go after, but the thing about me is I've never been after fame. That sounds cliché, but it's true. I think fame sounds uncomfortable to me, but being able to like write this book and make my living doing very exciting, creative stuff sounds really amazing. It has been really amazing.