Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
-
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
-
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
-
A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.
-
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
-
Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
-
I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
-
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
-
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
-
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
-
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
-
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
-
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
-
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.
-
I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.
-
I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
-
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
-
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
-
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
-
'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
-
I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.
-
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
-
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
-
Hope is universal.
-
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.