A Quote by Elizabeth McCracken

Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.
I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.
In Hawaii, if you're invited to dinner, it's assumed that the children are invited as well. On the islands, no one treats children like they're not part of the conversation. People talk to children as people and include them in adventures and conversations.
Working with children is very different than the way in which I work with adults. One has to work just as much with children as with adults, but the manner of work is very different. I never tell the children the actual truth of the thing that I want them to act.
[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.
There are no gatekeepers in children's literature. There are children who like what you write because it's funny.
Operation Peter Pan spanned from 1960-62 whereby over 14,000 children were sent away from their families in Cuba, some never to reunite again. Pan Am flights took the children to Miami FL, 'Never-Never Land', and the children became known as the 'Peter Pans.' I wrote this song for my daughter, and it is sung for all the daughters and mothers, fathers and brothers who felt this pain of separation all because of governments and their politics.
Ever since I had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious resources for my children and their children's children. This is the obligation of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.
We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
I always love working with children. I never had children of my own. God has his purposes. God didn't let me have children so everybody's children could be mine. That's kind of how I'm looking at it.
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.
This conversation with the audience has been going on since, what, '72, '73... Sometimes it's like a conversation after dinner with friends. You're in a restaurant, and you got there at 8 o'clock. Suddenly, you realize it's midnight. Where did the time go? You're enjoying the conversation. It's sort of a natural, organic conversation.
If you write for children with respect and treat them with dignity - you'll capture the adults as well. Children deserve nothing but our very best. Nothing but excellence will do for the young, because the responsibility is greater. We write up for children, never down.
People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.
As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think.
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