Jeff Kinney Quotes
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Kids and adults have a difference of opinion when it comes to what constitutes legitimate reading. Adults often push books that they loved as children, which, ironically, were often books that their parents weren't particularly keen on.
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There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.
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I'm not even the most influential person in my own house.
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I was an average kid who had his wimpy moments.
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I had an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother, and though I look back fondly on my childhood, I think that when you've got four siblings sharing the same resources and a single kids' bathroom, it's going to get a little tense at times.
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I take comedy very seriously, and I feel very competitive.
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I work in the house next to where I live. We bought a smaller house that I use as my office and the place where my two employees work... We've got tens of thousands of letters from kids stored all over the house in places you would usually put dishes and other things like that.
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I labored for eight years thinking I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.
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I draft on the computer. I have a really giant screen that attaches to my laptop, and then I have a humongous digital drawing tablet called a Cintiq. It sits at all different angles, and it's so big that it would take two people to move it.
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Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.
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I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.
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I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.
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If I were put into a college lecture hall right now and told to pay attention for 45 minutes, it would be physically impossible for me to do. I'm one of those people who believe that ADD is a gift. It's tough to manage, but if you can harness it you can do great things.
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I feel, as an adult, I'm very similar to how I was as a pre-teen. Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but I feel like it's easy to slip back into those shoes, and I feel like if we were all magically transported back to our middle school years, we'd all act like we did in middle school.
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'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style that mixed cartoons and 'traditional' writing, and that's how 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' was born.
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In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college.
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With the recent addition of a full soundtrack and the players map, millions of Poptropicans around the globe are now fully immersed in a multimedia gaming experience when they embark on our high quality adventures.
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Kids can sniff out a moral. They can feel the heavy hand of an adult.
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To come out and meet kids who have my books in their hands is kind of amazing.
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I never thought I was writing for kids at all. It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids, I might actually have spelt things out a bit more, and that would probably have killed the appeal.
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When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.
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I don't think of cartoons or comics as being for kids.
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Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to, and they don't like it. So while my books aren't amoral, they are not infused with morals or a message, either, and kids like that.
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I think the most satisfying part about filmmaking is seeing a production in full bloom. When I write, I write in isolation.