Quotations
"A young friend of my son's once asked me if I had 'made' the book Clowns: The Fun Makers. I started to correct him, saying that I had 'written' it. Then I realized that making a book is more correct. Publishing a book is more than writing. It's the revision, the publisher-seeking, the chaptering, the art-work, the meeting of deadlines, the intensive work with a book's editors. And the unparalleled thrill of holding in your hands the result of a creative idea once inside your head and heart."
"I had always had an unfocused interest in writing. It came into focus as I was reading to my students in a one-room school in Michigan in 1970. I saw such enjoyment in their eyes that it made me want to give that enjoyment myself. So I began writing magazine stories and articles in order to gain the experience that would teach me how to write."
"At first I thought of children's books as a stepping stone to writing 'serious' books for adults. But stepping along the stones, I found my imagination being captured by a world of literature that I had never taken seriously. I've been a willing captive of children's books ever since."
"What I discovered is that children's books are serious literature. They are roads that children travel as they develop into adults. Hopefully, the ideas they feed on along the way in books will be included in their adult selves and not surrendered to the demands of a falsely sophisticated adult world in which imagination is often undernourished."
"There is much in adult media that fails to exercise imagination and thus threatens to 'obsolesce' it. Imaginative children's books can deliver a child's imagination intact into their adult self. For me, this has made writing children's books a pretty serious business. But fortunately, humor is one of the tools I have found most useful. It keeps us from the opposite extreme that also smothers imagination: taking life too seriously."
"I take neither rejections nor acceptances too seriously. The rejection of a manuscript can be the road to its revision and acceptance, and continual acceptance can be the road to unimaginative books. Long live rejection and acceptance, and longer live imaginative children's books!"
Read more about this topic: Mel Boring
Famous quotes containing the word quotations:
“Reading any collection of a man’s quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won’t go away hungry, but it’s not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.”
—Christopher Buckley, U.S. author. A review of three books of quotations from Newt Gingrich. “Newtie’s Greatest Hits,” The New York Times Book Review (March 12, 1995)
“A book that furnishes no quotations is, me judice, no book—it is a plaything.”
—Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866)