Jenny Han Quotes

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

I was a huge rereader, so I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia, at minimum, 13 times each. In reading that series, I realized that someone had written those books, and that was that person's job. And I thought, 'That is the job for me. That is the job I'm going to have when I grow up.'

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

I always knew I was going to grow up to be a storyteller; that's one of the earliest things I remember about myself. There was never a question of me not writing.

I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

It's important to for your kids to see themselves in their superheroes. Really, it's important for all of us.

I didn't grow up with a lot of role models necessarily when I started out - there weren't many people who looked like me on TV. Not in England.

My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didn't write another black character until I was 18.

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

Something that's hard for me, I remember being a child in the '80s and looking at this field. It was a field I wanted very much to go into, but I didn't see people who looked like me working in video games. You can't really be it if you can't see it.

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.