Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.
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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
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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.
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If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
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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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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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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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'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
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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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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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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 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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Hope is universal.
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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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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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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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I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
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When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'