Quotes from Judy Blume

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

When I was growing up in the 1950s, sweaters were a huge thing.

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.

In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.

Nobody talks about housewives anymore! This is what we were supposed to do in the '50s. Not everybody, but in my milieu. My crowd. You went to college, and you got a degree in case, God forbid, you ever had to work. And you better find somebody to marry while you're there, because otherwise, what's going to become of you?

Suddenly question number four popped into my mind. Have you thought about how this relationship will end?

I loved 'Moneyball,' I thought that was a great Hollywood movie. I like baseball, but I don't know that you have to like baseball to like that. I thought it was really well done.

You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.

I'm very good at setting goals and deadlines for myself, so I don't really need that from outside.

My kids both had acne, and I never saw a book dealing with the subject.

I've never been one to let others decide what's right for me or my children.

It's all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it's that determination.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.

I wish I could prevent my kids from making all the mistakes I've made. But I can't do that. No parent can.

We can have our beliefs and still read and discuss things.

By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.

I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.

I think the child I was until 12 was so much more interesting than the teenager I became.

I don't have anything new to say about teenagers.

Some characters become your friends for life. That's how it was for me with Betsy-Tacy.

It's good to have fantasies and creative fantasies, especially.

I was a fearful kid and, for some crazy reason, a pretty fearless writer.

My husband is a feminist!