Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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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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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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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 strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
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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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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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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
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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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The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
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'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
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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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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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Hope is universal.
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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 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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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 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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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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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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I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
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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.