Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.

I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.

The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.

I write for whoever needs to read it.

There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!

People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.