Children Quotes

People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it's the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn't want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

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.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.

Do not sit next to my mother when she is watching one of her children compete because you will have fingernails down your back. She is a nervous wreck.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

I don't have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous wound in kids due to a lack of their dads.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

Several people have told me that one of the most meaningful events they could attend would be something at the White House with their children.