Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

Reading equals hope times change.

For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?

My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.

I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.

I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.

To watch your home change in front of you is surprising. But at the same time, going someplace like Mississippi, makes me appreciate even this.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'

My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.