A Quote by Anthony Browne
Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
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Personally, I never understood the power of having books written about your experience - whatever that experience may be - until I wrote one and started hearing from teens. I just got an email from a reader who said that "Thirteen Reasons Why" was the first time they had felt understood. A book shouldn't be anybody's first time feeling understood and that's where censorship bothers me. These books need to be out there.
The process for writing a picture book is completely different from the process of writing a chapter book or novel. For one thing, most of my picture books rhyme. Also, when I write a picture book I'm always thinking about the role the pictures will play in the telling of the story. It can take me several months to write a picture book, but it takes me several years to write a novel.
I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.
You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.
When I write a book I write the best that I can and so much of that for me is following the book's demands, the subject's requirements - I love books, I always have. They have always been one of the places where I have felt very happy in the world. When I was younger, I loved to read genre fiction - I loved the magic-carpet ride of story! Now I need other things - I need the beautiful particular and strange language and form which brings a writer's book to life in me and speaks to my intellect, and, dare I say it, to my soul.
I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books…. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.
God found me when I was at my lowest point. That was the first time in my life when I really felt like I understood who Jesus was - it was more than just knowing about Him: I felt like He met me in that time and place.
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.
The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.
The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
I didn't write professionally at first. It took me nine years to get anything published. At the beginning I mostly wrote picture books, which were rejected by every children's book publisher in America. The first book of mine to be accepted for publication was ELLA ENCHANTED, and not one but two publishers wanted it. That day, April 17, 1996, was one of the happiest in my life.
When I choose the title [for my book], which was my favorite title, I felt sure there was going to be a dozen books maybe with that name already because it's so obvious to me that that's the message. I was surprised it hasn't been the title of a single book. Well, there is a Shel Silverstein children's book called Falling Upwards. But no one has chosen Falling Upward as a title and I'm very happy it's right on the cover.
I felt that there were so many things that could go wrong, in adapting The Hunger Games , and I had this fierce desire to protect this book that she had written. At that time, I read the second book, in manuscript form, and so I saw where she was going with the series. I was able to convince Suzanne [Collins] to trust me with the books.
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