Judy Blume
Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination.Collection: Imagination
Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.Collection: Fear
I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.Collection: Morning
I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter,' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.Collection: Thankful
Life goes on if you're one of the lucky ones.
My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: 'Please don't take me in the middle of the sweater.' And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen.
You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.
It's all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it's that determination.
I was wildly interested in puberty as a child.
Everybody wants to share life and be in love and be loved.
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.
I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!
What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.
A good writer is always a people watcher.
When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
As a child who loved to read, I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading.
I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary's funny and wonderful books.
The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.
My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.
Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' has been targeted by censors for promoting New Ageism, and Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' for promoting racism. Gee, where does that leave the kids?
I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote 'Smart Women.' I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.
I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.
At the time I wrote 'Forever,' I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.
We can have our beliefs and still read and discuss things.
I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.
Nobody talks about housewives anymore! This is what we were supposed to do in the '50s. Not everybody, but in my milieu. My crowd. You went to college, and you got a degree in case, God forbid, you ever had to work. And you better find somebody to marry while you're there, because otherwise, what's going to become of you?
I believe that 'The Artist' is the kind of movie you see and you don't forget. I know it's going to stay with me.
Telling kids the truth isn't always entirely possible, but talking to them is.
Fear is contagious, and those who wish America to become a faith-based society are doing their best to spread it.
I am very sentimental, very emotional, but never in my writing; I am very tough.
I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'
When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.
The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.
I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.
I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.
I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.
I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.
What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.
When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.
The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
I meet people on the street or at book signings and they tend to treat me as if they know me, as if we're connected. It's great.
I love to watch movies.
When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.
In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.
I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.
The protests against Harry Potter follow a tradition that has been growing since the early 1980s and often leaves school principals trembling with fear that is then passed down to teachers and librarians.