Top 1200 Children's Books Quotes & Sayings

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.

I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic.

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.

I keep writing children’s books, I keep making children’s books, because I still have them inside of me.

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

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.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

You can't write a children's book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children's books, but it would actually be bad if I did.

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

There aren't many children's books about black characters that are just going on adventures. My library has over 2,000 children's books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures.

Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

I'm interested in illustration in all its forms. Not only in books for children but in posters, prints and performance as a way of drawing people into books and stories.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.

People think children's books are about teddy bears and little flowers. I realize people sometimes don't know what to do with my books because they say, 'Is it a children's book, and what age group?'

People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.

when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.

If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

I always wanted to be a children's author, and I have a really big library of children's books. All the ones from when I was little, they are just so beautiful. I read kids' books, and they calm me down.

In my experience, adults rarely bother reading the reviews of children's books and almost never read the books themselves - particularly if they don't have children.

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.

Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips.They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading. Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.

I would love to write more children's books. There is such a high standard out there for children's books; there are really amazing writers. It is a fantastic creative outlet and such an amazing teaching tool. The thing I love about kids, too, is it is so imaginative and poetic.

While books expand horizons by exposing us to worlds outside our own, children also need to see themselves, their experiences and their cultures reflected in books they read. Unfortunately, for too many children, this is not the norm.

I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.

I think that children who read are better writers, and children who tell stories appreciate books.

I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

I'd love to develop and star in my own children's show, write children's books, do children's albums, movies, DVDs, etc.

Writing my own stories had always been one of my dreams, but I didn't start until I was 29. I was working in a book warehouse and was assigned to the third floor where all the children's books were. For four and a half years, I spent all day, every day around children's books, and it wasn't long before I fell in love with them.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

I read a lot of books to my children, and they all seem really good. I think people have gotten really good at children's books.

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at proper books, which means books without pictures.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.

Part of the job of a children's author is to write books that will be remembered, definitely, but if I might go out on a limb, I will say that the other part, the more important part, is to build books that will help children fall in love with reading. That, to me, is the real job.

All of my children's books are attempts to tap into what I believe to be children's, and to some extent human beings', fantasies.

Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.

There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not.

I don't really read children's books or deal with children's books, so I don't have any relationship with them other than my own.

I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.

Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.

I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story.

To the children who loved Harry Potter, I want to say your enthusiasm was the real magic. I so enjoyed being on the journey with you. And to the adults who bought the Harry Potter books and devoured them, I just want to say, those books were for children.

I didn't read children's books when I was a child. The only books in our house were ration books.

I definitely thought I was going to write books. I wrote a couple of children's books when I was like 11 when I was a child myself!

We had absolutely no experience in writing kids books and its a very competitive market. But we buy and read a lot of children's books and we felt that our books had that extra something we were always looking for.

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

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.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?

Not every child takes instantly to books like a duck to water, but I don’t believe there are children who hate books. There are just children who haven’t yet found the right books for them.

There's a great place for good Christian children's books. After the upcoming projects I'm working on, I'd like to turn my attention back to children's books. Maybe with a granddaughter I'll have more inspiration and new ideas.

I'm the author of several books, including children's books.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dullness that they blunt the sense and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later - that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences.