Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Judy Blume
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Judy Blume.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.
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.
My father was the youngest of seven, and nobody lived to be 60. And so we were always sitting shiva in my house, and my father would say, 'Life goes on.'
I can't see an autobiography in my future. But who knows what might happen.
I never thought I wanted to write about the '50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.
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.
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!
I am such a rewriter; I have so many notebooks filled with drafts you wouldn't believe.
When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.
The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.
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 don't think people change; electronics change, the things we have change, but the way we live doesn't change.
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.
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'll always be grateful for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.' It brought me many, many, readers.
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.
I love to watch movies.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
I'm very good at setting goals and deadlines for myself, so I don't really need that from outside.
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.
When I was first writing, my little prayers were, 'Please, please, please. Let something be published someday.' Then it went to, 'Please, please, please. Let somebody read this.'
My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!
Everybody wants to share life and be in love and be loved.
I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.
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.
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.
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 books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.
A good writer is always a people watcher.
I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.
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.
The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.
I discovered the National Coalition Against Censorship when I felt totally alone in my fight to protect intellectual freedom, and that group changed my life. I was no longer alone.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have the most loyal readers in the world.
I'm an Obama chick.
It's good to have fantasies and creative fantasies, especially.
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.
If only there was a vaccine to protect against breast cancer, we'd be lining up - wouldn't we?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.
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.
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.'
I'm thinking of sending out censorship packets: information to share with those who want to defend my books when they come under fire. I'll tell why I wrote them and include reviews and letters of support from children and their parents.
If those of us who care about making our own decisions about what to read and what to think don't take a stand, others will decide for us.
Life goes on if you're one of the lucky ones.
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.
I've never been one to let others decide what's right for me or my children.
Everything they say a girl should get from her father in terms of total acceptance and love, I got all that from my father. But then I married a man just like my mother - so phlegmatic.
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.
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