Children S Authors

"The only person who saw the car go into the ravine that night was Berlatsky."

"For forty-three years Berlatsky had made a point of keeping out of trouble and now there was this."

"Berlatsky noted these things because all his life he had noted things, like a sparrow picks at crumbs. You could miss a lot of chances by not using your eyes."

"It is strange…that sometimes people assume the worst of children if they come from poor families. I remember being astonished when I took my daughter to a party given by her schoolfriend’s parents. They lived in a lovely, big house very near the block of council flats where I grew up. The mother was very friendly to me, and said how pleased she was that our daughters were friends because obviously she could have nothing to do with ‘those dreadful scary rough children from the council flats’. I didn’t want to embarrass her by saying that I had once been one of those very children."

"I can't think of a book where there's a woman born into a working-class background, who in her 70s is living a very comfortable, upper-middle-class sort of life; a woman who married at 19, had a baby at 21, was a policeman's wife for years, but whose marriage broke up in late middle age and who became very well known for a time. She then met a woman and became very happy with her. There isn't one!"

"I don't think that girls would ever have wanted a grey-haired, wrinkly writer as a role model if they were wanting to feel good about maybe being gay…I'm sure they could find much more glamorous examples."

"[Her mother stopped her daughter from wearing any jewelry. Wilson refers to a large rose quartz ring on her finger] I mean, isn't it pathetic when, even in your 70s, you wear things that a psychiatrist would point out is rebelling against your mother?"

"[Referring to Trish, her civil partner] I asked her about earlier girlfriends and she said she'd never had a year-after-year relationship, and I thought: "Right, I'm going to be that." And I have been, so far."

"I’ve tried hard…I don't know … my experience of my own dad and my own ex-husband possibly has some effect. I will remedy this. It is very unfair. I have tried harder, but I just can't quite get there yet."

"My mum would have loved Shirley Temple as a daughter – full of confidence, tap-dancing all over the place in flouncy clothes, and showing off. [She had] A girl sitting there reading a book, looking gormless."

"[After reaching no. 7 in the best-seller lists] But a certain JK Rowling came along and you're never going to beat that. And there's always been one or two others much better than me. [Better or bigger?] Bigger! [laughs] Occasionally better."

"Vietnamese is so lyrical, and 80% percent of it is derived from Chinese, which is a language built from pictures not words. So this format and voice came out of that desire."

"They're told to gather the stories of their parents and grandparents and to honor their cultural history. And yet, as they're born in the United States, they don't identify with Vietnam and feel strongly that these are not their roots, so how can they lose them?"

"I had no idea how lonely it would be to sit in my cave and type, for years and years. I have developed a totally new personality where I talk to myself and play with my hair for entertainment. The surprise is that after much frustration and exhaustion, I do manage to finish a novel."

"Journalism is just very structured…One day I turned in a story and [an editor] said to me, ‘You can’t compare inanimate objects with animate objects,’ and I realized I had to leave."

"…Early on is the time to be bold, to grow muscles, and build a thick skin. Tell the hard stories now—it builds the heart muscle. It’s also addictive, and will hopefully lead to more plays that matter over the writer’s career. From hard experience, I would urge all young writers to be compassionate of themselves and the source of their desire to write. The saddest thing I’ve witnessed is that fire being snuffed out…"

"…Everyone gets caught up in the “wright” of playwright (meaning to make or build or create), whereas I take daily joy and solace in the “play” part. How rare and wonderful to be asked to play in your very job title?"

"…There is something holy about the experience of sitting in the dark, looking at the light and living the story happening in front of us in real time that just can’t be replicated…"

"I am a solo flyer. I go by dramatist or playwright. My brand is original plays that take on aspects of our shared American history that have shaped our culture. I write serious plays, but I use as much humor as possible. I also use a lot of music (original and found), and I’m not afraid to examine my characters’ sexuality…"

"People of color face mass incarceration and execution and racism and systematic oppression, taking away so many of our chances to use our talents and abilities as well."

"Fantasy and science fiction novels are metaphors for our world. If a speculative book looks at our world through the eyes of a marginalized person, white readers might not connect with that character, because they haven’t faced racism. They’re not excited by a plot where black and brown characters must fight white oppressors, because they have to see themselves as the villain rather than the hero. They see a main character that doesn’t look like them, and without quite knowing why, they don’t find the story relatable…"

"There are people who would be able to do the same if they’d been given the same privileges as me. I think of how, in our society, so many of us like to consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. We tell ourselves that we would’ve been better than our ancestors: We would’ve fought slavery, fought internment and concentration camps, stopped genocide. Yet these are all things that are happening in the world right now, and I feel a helplessness and hopelessness…"

"Because I write contemporary, magical realism and speculative for both children and adults, I spend a lot of time thinking about real settings for the contemporary books and the pieces that could be taken from those places to create fantasy spaces. But I also like to look for the magic in the real world…"

"For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need."

"I tend to believe whatever you decide to look for you will find, whatever you beckon will eventually beckon you."

"The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin 'litterae,' you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means 'things made of letters."

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle ... I'm going with B, everything."

"My wife gave me a gift at the end of her column when she left me that empty space, one I would like to offer you. A blank space to fill. The freedom and permission to write your own story. Here is your empty space. What will you do with your own fresh start?"

"I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet."

"I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again."

"I feel like, as a person of color, I’ve always been kind of doing the work against the tide…I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes."

"I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page…"

"I realized the more specific the story, the more universal it becomes."

"The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South. And the town we lived in - Nicholtown, which was a small community within Greenville, S.C. - was an all-black community. And people still lived very segregated lives, I think, because that was all they had always known. And there was still this kind of danger to integrating. So people kind of stayed in the places - the safe places that they had always known."

"The words are not the same and the feeling is not the same. You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman. She is either beautiful or faithful. So it’s better when she’s beautiful because when she’s too faithful it might be very ugly. This is French people. This translation, though, is very well made. This is my American editor, who knows me very well who has made the translation. But in any translation you lose a little bit."

"If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me."

"This is past, and it really comes from a very dark moment of my life. Dying is...When people say there is no alternative, there is always an alternative - to die, for example. It's a choice. You always have this choice."

"When they talk about “The men ruined this, the men did that,” it is a person, and their sex comes after what they’ve done. I believe that we say too much “We the women” and “We the men,” but should say “We the human beings.” There are really two types of human being -- the ones who care about environment, who want a more just society; and the other ones who care about greed and war. So it’s not a question of East and West, and American and Iranian, and women and men."

"Well depressive, I don't know. If you have a little sensibility or a heart you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I'm happy I just want to dance.""

"I remember loving Chato’s Kitchen by Gary Soto and Susan Guevara; I couldn’t believe that there was a book in the library about people from el barrio (actually cats, mice, and dogs), dressed, speaking, cooking, and having a family life that resembled mine. These books—and countless others—are the reason why I started making my own books..."

"Mine is literary, and mine has a story to tell about a little boy with gaps in his education who became a writer. I’m hoping that the visitor will be curious, not unlike when someone goes to another person’s house for the first time—you look around and learn something about that person. We’re curious creatures, right?"

"Often my characters—a Jesus, a Hector, a Gloria—will be bilingual, or if not bilingual at least know enough Spanish to throw words and phrases into conversation. As a writer, I'm trying to capture the voice of my characters, who sometimes will speak in Spanglish…"

"Poems written in rhyme and meter can be easily memorized, even longish poems. However, because I write in free verse, my lines are probably more difficult to take in, to absorb, to memorize. But I'm not seeking any students to memorize my poetry—heck, I don't even know my poems. I'm hoping for a sentiment that will linger in the reader's mind. Sentiment, or feeling, is so important to the reader…"

"I tried to capture the recollection of that experience. As if to say, you have these war-like, traumatic experiences and you retell them and retell them and each time you add something that wasn’t there the first time. The truth effect of that is that it just becomes larger and larger because your memory details are at work. The question then becomes: how many of those little embellishments—how many of those little nuances—can you add up before they tell a larger truth about the time that you were living in? That’s really the effect of writing a book, I think…"

"I think the joy of reading any book is that you enter where you can, like reading a poem. Sometimes we start off with a title or we enjoy a piece for its sonic effect, an image, or innovation. Reading a book is more or less the same process. At the start, you might be outside the experience, but the language is specific enough that it will draw you in, first with its music and then with its attempt at recollection…"

"How is one to reconstruct a memory of a place that doesn’t exist anymore? I mean the buildings are still there, but the faces are no longer the same. Gentrified NYC has pretty much eviscerated the nuances of particular neighborhoods, like El Barrio…"

"It means handling words and images in an interesting way. All of us use words daily, unless of course we are the silent type. Everyday we say simple things like, "Gee, look at this tan of mine." Or: "I feel sort of sad." But say you wrote something like: "Our faces were the color of pennies," and "Our souls are broken like jars." The language becomes interesting and perks up our spirits and imagination. This is what poetry means—language that surprises and keeps us on our toes."

"I use vignettes and dialogue as a way of relaying a moment. Storytelling is not a monotonic medium. Rule breaking is a conscious decision and, yes, it comes with consequences. I think the nostalgia is really a specific memory made of the right words that are more celebratory, elegiac, than nostalgic."

"Corners. It’s always been corners. Corners help me see angles. All of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime was written on the corners of 123rd Street and Lexington Avenue in East Harlem. After hanging out for a day, an evening, or breaking night, I would retreat to my Olympia electric typewriter that was usually sitting on my desk, in the corner of the bedroom where I looked out of the window as a kid, and would get to work on a poem…"

"My natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?"