Childhood Literature Quotes

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

I first read 'Tom Sawyer' when I was in 8th grade, 13 years old. I realised since that Mark Twain just bottled what it felt like to be a child.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

That's the feeling [of relativity] I always had about [Judy Blume] books which I re-read and re-read and re-read.

I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.

In my class - in all fifth-grade classes - we were required to read 'classics,' books like 'Shiloh,' which is about a white boy and the dog he rescues. And 'Old Yeller,' which is about a white boy and the dog that rescues him. And 'Where the Red Fern Grows,' which is about a white boy and the two dogs he trains.

I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.

I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!

I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.

There were no small brown kids as the centre of the children's fiction I grew up with.

Two dads have sent me letters that said my books changed their daughters' lives. I send them packages with T-shirts and posters because, come on... that's the coolest.

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

It's so easy as a child to identify with 'Winnie-the-Pooh.' The humour doesn't talk down at you. It's a very grown up humour - a little bit ironic, a bit self deprecating.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

The first book I really loved was 'Little Women' - I'd have given anything for Beth to have been allowed to live; I remember crying very much over her death, trying to make the words change just by staring at them. I loved 'Anne of Green Gables,' too; 'What Katy Did;' and 'Peter Pan.'

I wanted to write honest books for kids because I didn't have those when I was a kid.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

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.

I loved reading Roald Dahl when I was young but I had forgotten a lot about the books. I read the 'BFG' on the iPad the other day and it was so interesting to see his descriptions of clothes and places.

When my younger son was 13 years old, he asked me to read 'Swallows and Amazons' to him while he made models. He liked it so much that I ended up reading all thirteen of Ransome's books, including the ones that I missed out on. This led my son to 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Coral Island.'

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.

I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.

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