Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
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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.
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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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My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
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I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.
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I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
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I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.
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I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
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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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I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
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As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
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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.'
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Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.
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I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
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I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
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For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
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Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
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Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.
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I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.
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My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
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If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
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I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
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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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Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.