Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
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In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.
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My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.
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Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.
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I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.
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I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.
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The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.
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The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
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I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.
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Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
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What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.
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I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'
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My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.
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The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
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I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
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I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?
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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.
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I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
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In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
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I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
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I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.
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Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.
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Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'
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I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.