Childhood Creativity Quotes

My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard."

I used to want to be a children's writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I'd write them and draw them, and turn them into class.

Children are so talented. Little children, until about the age of 10 or 11, are just little artists. They need to be given the time and the space and the materials to do their work. That's all they need.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination.

I made my first complete song when I was 9.

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

We are all born artists. ... Almost everything kids do is art.

As a child, I was always interested in building things. Instead of buying candy, I would purchase nails, which I used to construct things out of scrap wood. My mother always claimed that my spending my money on nails instead of on candy was why I was so skinny as a kid.

I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum.

I started writing books and making clothes for my dolls when I was around 10 as a way of making my reality exciting. When I went out to play with friends, I always arranged elaborate sets and costumes.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

I started drawing when I was about 2, mostly pictures of my mother and my sister. When I got into school, instead of taking the notes that I should have been taking, I was drawing in all of my notebooks. It was an artwork thing for me at first.

I started writing my own songs from the time I was a little kid. I would write my own lyrics to other people's songs that I heard on the radio and take whatever song and make it about fairies and angels - whatever little girls sing about.

I was 9 when I wrote 'Fate Stay with Me.' It was this fictional song about romance gone wrong.

I was imagining films in my head and trying to gather friends together to make movies since I was a kid. I tried to do comedy skits and a horror film.

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!

I was writing and cartooning and writing short stories from grade school on.

When we were children, every day after school, my brother and sister and I would go to my mother's office. It was full of pencils and marker and fabrics and beads. It was so much fun to be a child and to express my creativity through drawing and to playing dress-up in all of the wonderful and colorful clothes.

I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.

When I was about five my dad built a stage for me in our basement. A full stage, with a curtain, a backdrop and a dressing room. There were three colored spotlights - a red one, a white one, and a blue one. Blue was for nighttime scenes, and red was for when we were in hell. If the neighborhood kids wanted to use the stage, they had to incorporate me into the play.

When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend and I used to think that he went everywhere with me, and that I could talk to him and that he could hear me, and that he could grant me wishes and stuff. And then I grew up, and I stopped going to church.

Everyone can draw when they're five. Most of us lose the ability.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.