Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.

I love slow readers. And readers who think about what I've written, think about how it's written - and copy me!

Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

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.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.

We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

Because I write realistic fiction, I generally don't think about fixing anyone - I just think about how I want to feel at the end of the book - And I try to write toward that feeling.

The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.

You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.