Youth Literature Quotes

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.

I really love middle-grade. Middle-grade books have a little more of a magical, light-hearted feel. You can be a little bit more quirky, you can have a little more humor. It doesn't get so dark and deep.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

My parents are pretty liberal. But they were just you know trying to look out for my innocence or whatever. But my babysitter had "Forever" [by Judy Blume]. And I said "Well I've read Judy Blume books, can I borrow that?" And she said no, this one's not appropriate for you. Which obviously, got me really worked up. So I took it.

'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.

I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'

I started a MySpace teen lit discussion group and invited people to join.

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

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

What should a good children’s book be like? If you ask me, I can tell you after thinking long and hard: It must be good.

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

This sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best - not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore - they probably won't - and find a book of mine and get something from it.

I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea.

I know that when I was a children's librarian, that was about 1940, boys particularly asked where were the books about kids like us, and there weren't any at that time.

I rarely read children's books.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

I came to fantasy fairly late. For some ten years, I had been happily writing fiction and non-fiction for adults. But I always loved fantasy, whether for adults or young people; and at that particular point in my life, I wanted to try it, to understand it, as part of the process of learning to be a writer. The results were beyond anything I could have foreseen. As I've said often and elsewhere, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life.

People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.