Children's Stories Quotes

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

Children's literature is as valid an art form as any other.

I like working on stories where I can explore the darker corners of childhood without illustrations but with humor.

Writing for children may have kept me young at heart.

I love doing kids' films.

In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.

The old fairy tales are very, very violent, and these days I think we could do with a little less of it.

Independently of the curious circumstance that such tales should be found existing in very different countries and languages, which augurs a greater poverty of human invention than we would have expected, there is also a sort of wild fairy interest in them, which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them.

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

Fairytales have always got to have that scary quality, as long as you make them laugh.

In my stories for children, I sometimes show a hard, harsh, dangerous world. I'm going to show you the way it is, but I'm going to also tell you that there's every reason to hope.

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

Hold it. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the three bears eat the three little pigs, and then the bears join up with the big bad wolf and eat Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood! Tell me a story like that, OK?

I'm in love with kid's stories and animation.

I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.

Writing for children is the toughest thing.

I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.

I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

If you read Grimm's fairy tales, they're absolutely terrifying.

I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.

If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.

For Halloween, I've gone trick-or-treating as Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Robin Hood.

I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.

Children's books are full of violence.