Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Aiken

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Joan Aiken.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.

English - Writer | September 4, 1924 - January 4, 2004

Source: Wikipedia

Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities.

Joan Aiken

The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

Joan Aiken

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.

Joan Aiken

If reading becomes a bore, mental death is on the way. Children taught to read by tedious mechanical means rapidly learn to skim over the dull text without bothering to delve into its implications -- which in time will make them prey to propaganda and to assertions based on scanty evidence, or none.

Joan Aiken

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

Joan Aiken

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.

Joan Aiken

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.

Joan Aiken

As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.

Joan Aiken

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.

Joan Aiken

since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Joan Aiken

You may think it odd that there were three men to look after one tiny station, but the people who ran the railway knew that if you left two men together in a lonely place they would quarrel, but if you left three men, two of them could always grumble to each other about the third, and then they would be quite happy.

Joan Aiken

Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Aiken

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