Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
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I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
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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.
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Hope is universal.
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I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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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.
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I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
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I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
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Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
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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!
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I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.
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In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
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I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
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People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
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We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.
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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.
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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.
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I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
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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.
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To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.
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With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.