Child Literature Quotes

Schools and parents can team up to find books that kids will really get excited about - that will make them say, 'That was a great experience. Now I know why people get excited about reading.'

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

One of the reasons I love writing for middle graders, besides their voracious appetite for books, is their deep concern for fairness and morality.

How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it

I think there is something barbaric in children, and it's missing in lots of books for them because we don't like to think of it. We want them to be happy [but] childhood is a very tough time.

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 don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.

I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

Kids should read whatever they want to read. So I'm hoping that just like 15-year-olds read "Summer Sisters," I'm hoping that they'll read this.

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

In a New York Post interview, Judy Blume, author of young-adult fiction, gave this advice on getting your kids to read: "Moms come up to me at book signings and describe how they're telling their daughters, 'These were my favorite books,'?" she says. "I say, 'Quit it! That's the biggest turnoff!'"You want to get them to read them, leave them around the house and every so often, say, 'You're not ready to read this yet.'

Writing for children is the toughest thing.

You can't mess around with young readers - you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.

I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.

The value of a story like 'Deadline' is kids get to look at death at the perfect distance. They can put the book down. They can experience the story, rub up against it, but it's not real life.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.

If there was Twitter when I wrote some of my early stuff, there'd be no 'Matilda.'

A lot of people who don't write for kids think it's easy, because they think kids aren't as smart as they are, or that you have to dumb down what you would normally write for kids. But I think you have to work harder when you write for kids, to make sure every word is right, that it's there for the right reason.

Girls read a boy book, but boys don't necessarily want to read a girl book.