Jane Yolen Quotes

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

Childrens books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.

The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.

You write to be read. That is the bottom line.

Exercise the writing muscle every day.

The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

Touch magic. Pass it on.

Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.