Quotes from Judy Blume

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: 'Please don't take me in the middle of the sweater.' And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that's where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for 'Tiger Eyes.'

After each book, I get panicky. I don't love the reviews. I don't like going through all that, and you would think that, after almost 40 years of writing, I'd have got the hang of it.

When I was young, I loved a series of books by an author called Maud Hart Lovelace and the series, which is still around, I'm happy to say, is - they're the 'Betsy-Tacy' books.

I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.

I can't relate to people who treat me as a 'famous person.' I only like to hang around with people who treat me as a regular person because that's what I am. All people are really just regular.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

I have a great T-shirt that I received at the New Jersey Hall of Fame when I was inducted. It says - it makes me choke up - it says, 'I'm a Jersey tomato'... I am. I am a Jersey girl and proud of it.

Everything they say a girl should get from her father in terms of total acceptance and love, I got all that from my father. But then I married a man just like my mother - so phlegmatic.

First of all I can only focus on one creative project at a time. I wish I could focus on two, because I really only write.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

Anybody who says, 'My childhood was completely happy,' is a person who isn't remembering the truth.

I don't want to repeat myself.

I'm thinking of sending out censorship packets: information to share with those who want to defend my books when they come under fire. I'll tell why I wrote them and include reviews and letters of support from children and their parents.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

I like revising much, much better than getting down a first draft. The first draft is just getting the pieces to the puzzle. Then I get to put the puzzle together!

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

Thats not a bad word, hate and war are bad words, fuck isnt.

Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination.

The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.