Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.

In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.

I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.

If you have no road map, you have to create your own.

I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.

In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.