Top 191 Quotes & Sayings by Jacqueline Woodson - Page 2

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

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.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

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!

My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.

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.

People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

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.

I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

Reading equals hope times change.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.

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.

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.

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

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.

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.

People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.

The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

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.'

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.

I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.

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.

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.

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.

In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.

I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'

Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.

My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

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.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.

Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.

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.

I think writers are the history keepers, right? We're the ones who are bearing witness to what's going on in the world. And I feel like it's our job to put that down on paper, and put it out into the world, so that it can be remembered.

People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.

But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.

From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

In all your getting, get understanding.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.