Top 1200 Children's Literature Quotes & Sayings

There is a very big difference between writing for children and writing for young adults. The first thing I would say is that 'Young Adult' does not mean 'Older Children', it really does mean young but adult, and the category should be seen as a subset of adult literature, not of children's books.

I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too.

Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

As for literature – to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children’s literature of the twentieth century.

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.

Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

Science Fiction is a branch of children's literature.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.

[My mom] had always wanted to write a children's book. She was a children's librarian and an elementary school teacher, so of course she loves children and children's literature.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child...Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.

South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fifty years? I don't know. Will there be printed books? Probably, but I'm not sure. There's always going to be literature, though. I believe that. I think literature has a way of getting deep into people and being essential. Literature has its own powers.

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

Children's literature is as valid an art form as any other.

Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.

I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life.

The other thing about the Nights is that it is quite racist. One parentheses is that I think this is one of the negative things that appeal to people, that The Arabian Nights could be used as a disguise for racism. It suited the West. You could smuggle racism into children's literature, you see. The African magician in the story of Aladdin, he's labeled explicitly as the "African Magician." He's not a character but a stereotype, and a lot of this got into nursery literature in this Oriental disguise.

In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.

Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.

I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.

I have a passion for children's literature. Young adult literature. I love it. I've always loved it.

No one spoke in terms of children's literature, as opposed to adult literature, until around the 1940s. It wasn't categorised much before then. Even Grimm's tales were written for adults. But it is true that ever since 'Harry Potter' there has been a renaissance in fantasy literature. J. K. Rowling opened the door again.

There is no such thing as children’s literature.

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.

Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

There are no gatekeepers in children's literature. There are children who like what you write because it's funny.

I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.

Children's literature is one of my joys, and it's also my mental comfort food.

In India's distant past, when the population was low, the blessing given a woman was, 'May you have many children.' Most of our epics and literature stress this wish, and the idea that a woman should have many children hasn't declined.

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

I'm not terribly conversant with children's literature in general. I tend to read books for adults, being an adult.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

I think the number of books published by Mr. Disney has nothing to do with whether or not he is bringing literature to children. That judgment has got to be based on quality rather than quantity. It's the same old problem that continually plagues American culture. I would rather have children playing their own games out of doors in the sunlight than getting the misrepresentation of literature as given by Walt Disney.

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

The work of one author or artist may stimulate another author or artist to push the edge, to take the risk, to go where the field hasn't gone before. The result -very exciting children's literature and art ... exciting both for the professional and for the intended audience, the children.