Meet the Author/Illustrator Archives

Lloyd Alexander On Fantasy
When asked how to develop intelligence in young people, Einstein answered: "Read fairy tales. . . ."

Jeannine Atkins Great Lives For Girls—And Boys (August 2004)
When I visit schools to talk about my books featuring women from history, often a boy asks, "Why do you write about just girls?"

Sue Alexander
As I was growing up in Chicago, it never occurred to me that someday I would write books for anyone to read.

Avi On Historical Fiction
To disdain history as boring and irrelevant is the ultimate human vanity.

Mary Azarian (May 2002)
The process I use to create my illustrations is a little unusual. I begin by drawing an image on a wooden board. . . .

T. A. Barron The Writer's Magic Wand (August 2005)
It's crazy, I know, but even in this day of amazing computer technology, I write all my first drafts in longhand. Even a draft as long as this one—over 400 pages. Why?

Stan and Jan Berenstain Books and Reading Versus Everything Else (December 2002)
There is nothing better we can do for our children—after fulfilling our obligations to feed, clothe, shelter, and love them—than to put them on the richly rewarding road to books and reading.

Ashley Bryan Discovering Ethnicity through Children's Books
There are so many ways in which we learn about life and the self. Each day opens paths to this exploration. For many of us, books play a major role in that adventure.

Don Brown The Secret of My Success (April 2006)
It was history, not art, that led me into children's literature.

Eric Carle
I thought it would be nice to have a quartet of books. . . . But then I thought, "Gee, a 'quintet' of books would be even nicer!"

Lori Marie Carlson
Not a few of my readers are puzzled by the books I write. "How come you do these bilingual volumes," they want to know. Sometimes this question is asked with a slight frown, as if to indicate I've crossed a line of propriety. . . .

Gennifer Choldenko When Are You Going to Write a Novel for Adults? (December 2005)
Evidently, some people feel that writing for children is some kind of starter exercise. Real writers write for grown-ups.

Vicki Cobb I Write What I Am (January 2006)
If I think of my life as a story, one of the advantages of advanced years is that I got to see how I turned out.

Ying Chang Compestine(September/October 2007)
The obstacles that are before us every day of our lives often seem insurmountable. I hope that my book Revolution can inspire others to overcome their personal obstacles.

Pat Cummings (February 2002)
I grew up around castles and ghosts and witches so the world within a children's book is an ideal environment to me.

Christopher Paul Curtis (March 2006)
I remember very clearly the first time I thought up "Christopher Curtis's Three Absolutely Immutable Rules for Good Writing."

Doug Cushman
My first job as a "professional" author/illustrator was in junior high school when I made comic books for my classmates. I transformed my teachers into zany superheroes battling even zanier super villains.

Alexandra Day (May 2003)
When my father was doing freelance work at home I remember rushing downstairs in the morning to see how the paintings he was working on had changed since I went to bed.

Leo and Diane Dillon (April 2003)
There are many ways to interpret a story. We toss ideas back and forth for days, even weeks. When the right idea comes along, we both get excited. Then we start with sketches.

Leonard Everett Fisher (May 2000)
While form rhythm, color, and light—words too—serve my artistic passion, the immediate focus of my work in books for young readers is on who we are, where we originated, and what we have done for and to each other.

Paul Fleischman (March 2003)
"I grew up in a house of voices," Rob begins his autobiography in Seek. Though his was a duplex in San Francisco, it was my own childhood home in Santa Monica, in southern California, that I saw in my mind.

Jean Fritz (February 2000)
I spent my childhood in China, hearing about America from my parents and having to wait until I was thirteen to get here. So I felt a need to make up for lost time. I determined to get to know all I could about America, past and present.

Jean Craighead George (September 2002)
The more I read and look around, the more incredible nature is to me.

Gail Gibbons (February 2006)
I can't believe it, but I've been writing and illustrating children's books for about thirty years.

James Cross Giblin Portraying the "Bad Boys" of History (April 2005)
In today's complex and often confusing world, I believe there's also room for biographies of people like John Wilkes Booth and Adolf Hitler. . . . Youngsters need to know about them and their like—where they came from, and why they did what they did—if only to be on guard against the rise of similarly dangerous individuals in the future.

Patricia Reilly Giff Why I Write for Children (November 2002)
Childhood, I think, is so much harder than adulthood.

Virginia Hamilton (April 2001)
They don't always have to "see" themselves when they read, but it's a nice surprise for them when they can say, "That child is just like me!"

Robie H. Harris Writing: In The Best Interests Of The Child (June 2006)
I don't set out to tackle difficult subjects. Rather, I write about what grabs me emotionally, what I find fascinating, and most always they are the same kinds of things I think children, even very young children, wonder about.

Phillip Hoose (July 2002)
I've been writing books now for about twenty years. The first few were for adults, but as daughters arrived and absorbed me into their lives I started writing for young readers.

Lee Bennett Hopkins The Power of Poetry
Let's make Poetry Week the start of a journey that will last always—today, tomorrow, forever.

Paul Janeczko (March 2000)
I didn't start out to be a poetry anthologist. I started out as a kid in New Jersey who had two major goals in life: 1) to survive one more year of delivering newspapers without being mauled by Ike, the one-eyed, slobbering cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill; and 2) to become more than a weak-hitting, third-string catcher on our sorry Little League team. I failed at both.

Laurie Lazzaro Knowlton (November/December 2007)
I hadn't thought of myself as an artist since elementary school. Somewhere along the line I had lost my artistic confidence. So the fact that I wanted to write and illustrate this book felt a whole lot like standing naked and asking if the crowds of people saw any flaws. But for some reason, the book wouldn't let me alone.

E. L. Konigsburg (June 2003)
I have always loved the English language, but all the while that I was studying/researching/teaching science, I never dreamed that that love would evolve into my becoming a children's book writer.

Kathryn Lasky Political Correctness and Children's Historical Literature
Max had said what all the teachers in the English department had been dying to say for the last several years but never dared. . . . the moral of the story is "face it."

Steven L. Layne Looking Back . . . (September 2005)
When I think of how it all began for me—and it's writing, of course, that I'm speaking of—I'm drawn back to Mary Lou Porter's first-grade classroom. . . . It was in her classroom that the idea of story, especially the fantastic, first took root in me.

Ursula K. Le Guin A Message About Messages (July 2005)
My fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon. . . . Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice?

Betsy Lewin (August 2001)
When asked, "What do you do for a living?" young adult mystery writer M. F. Shura delighted in saying, "I kill people."

Ted Lewin (July 2000)
Reading a manuscript by another author is like embarking on a journey of discovery.

Anita Lobel Self-Discovery through Writing
I have always trusted that what I have become is an accumulation of what I have learned.

Jackie Briggs Martin Living in the Village of Story-Lovers
I have always loved the sounds of words. One of my earliest memories is of my mother waking me up in the morning with an explanation of the "runcible spoon" in Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat," which we had read the night before.

Pat and Fred McKissack Working Together (October 2000)
Our office is in our home, yet we "go to work" every morning—downstairs. We are totally electronic, but when the power goes off, a pencil and pad still works.

Laura Krauss Melmed (May 2006)
The characters may be imagined, the events fabricated, the setting as distant as another planet or as fantastic as Hogwart's, but if a writer connects with a reader in the hoped-for way, then the reader will find truth in that fiction.

Cyd Moore (June 2000)
You must understand that "illustration" was a dirty word in fine art programs. You were either an artist or an illustrator, but never could you ever combine the two.

Jim Murphy Waiting for the Hmmm (June/July 2001)
I don't know about you, but the history books I had to read while growing up had a number of things in common: they tried to give a complete overview of our past by presenting lots of names (usually of famous individuals), lots of dates, and lots of events. All written in a very even, very serious—some would say dry and passionless—sort of prose.

Josephine Nobisso Writing a Painting (November 2005)
It's one of the miracles of life that, inclining head and heart over squiggles on a page, a reader climbs over the frame of a book, and steps right into the painting an author wrote.

Doris Orgel
When I was five or six years old, I thought: What if I'd been born an elephant, or duck? It could have happened!

Mary Pope Osborne (March/April 2002)
In 1972, recently out of college and traveling through Europe, I fell for a man from Spain who talked me into "going to the East." I'd read all of Herman Hesse, studied the religions of the world, and was eager for adventure. So with little money and no preparation, I took off with my newfound friend.

Linda Sue Park (June 2004)
I began work on the story that eventually became A Single Shard with nothing but the setting in mind.

Richard Peck (December 2001)
Once or twice, perhaps, in a long writing career, a character lifts off the page and takes on extraordinary life.

Stefan Petrucha (January/February 2008)
They say a picture's worth a thousand words, for instance, but it depends on the picture and the words, no?

Jerry Pinkney (October 2001)
Alan E. Cober, a very close friend of mine, often spoke of style in art as "the use of all experiences in one's life informing the artist's works."

Jack Prelutsky One Night I Couldn't Sleep, or How I Wrote Scranimals (January 2003)
I've been writing children's poetry for almost forty years, yet much of the creative process still remains a mystery to me.

Robert Quackenbush On Being a Writer in Addition to an Illustrator
I received a letter from a little girl who wrote, "I like the books you illustrate, but are you really a duck?"

Chris Raschka (June 2002)
When I first moved to New York, thirteen years ago, I used to sneak into the Children's Book Council library to ogle the books.

James Rice Illustrating a Classic—Bringing New Life to an Old Tale
I look at each project as a new challenge. I don't set out to create a classic—I just do what seems right to me at the time.

Willo Davis Roberts On Writing Mysteries for Young People
My first thirty-five books were all for adults, and The View From the Cherry Tree was intended for the same audience, but my publishers didn't know what to do with it.

Meg Rosoff (June 2005)
There's a lot of me in each of my characters, but I am mostly Wild Boar.

Kathy Ross (July 2006)
People are often surprised to hear that I am not a talented artist. . . . What I have to offer are good ideas.

Louis Sachar
I'm sitting in my office, which is located over the garage of my house in Austin, Texas. My dogs, Lucky and Tippy, are here with me. They are the only people allowed in my office when I'm writing. . . .

Robert D. San Souci (January 2002)
I think a large part of what urges me to write about global cultures (including our own) is a lifelong interest in the ways people live and think: the differences and similarities.

Jon Scieszka Think About It
I'm always at bit of a loss for what to tell people when they ask me what my books are about.

Brian Selznick The Fine Art of Collaboration; or, We Can Have Gold Lettering, Right? (September 2001)
The phone rings. It's your editor. She has a manuscript for you to illustrate. By the time she finishes describing it, your mind is spinning and all you can say is "I'll do it."

David Shannon (September 2000)
There are a lot of fun aspects to making children's books, but I think my favorite is developing characters.

Marc Simont (October 2002)
My father was my first art teacher. Following a visit to New York after World War I, he decided it would be good for my sisters and me to have a blend of the Old World values and the New World feeling of freedom.

Diane Stanley On Researching, Writing and Illustrating Biographies
I chose them not only because they were important but also because their stories were dazzling. If I am fascinated, it stands to reason my readers will be, too.

Simms Taback (November 2001)
I have enjoyed illustrating many books for children on diverse subjects, but it wasn't until I began to create my Caldecott-winning book, Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (Viking), that I experienced something quite different. It turned into a personal journey of artistic expression and discovery that I had not expected.

Mark Teague Criticism (August 2002)
I guess I figured I could work out all my mistakes in private and not show people what I was up to until I was really, really good—so good there would be nothing to criticize.

Neil Waldman (September 2003)
I'd like to tell you about one of the publishers I write and illustrate for, because they're very special.

David Wiesner (January 2001)
That idea of shifting realities became a recurring motif in my childhood drawings and went on to permeate the books I write and illustrate now.

Mo Willems How to Become Rich and Famous in One Easy Step (and other stuff that has nothing to do with making kids' books) (May 2005)
I was like all those other children who take great pleasure in making up funny stories for others. I just forgot to stop.

Vera B. Willims Some Thoughts on Writing and Illustrating (February 2003)
For all those sixty-nine years, I have felt close to that six-, and also seven-, eight- and nine-, year-old that I was. I have felt myself to be a kind of spokesperson for childhood.

David Wisniewski Cutting Remarks
My style of cut-paper illustration is actually a very simple process taken to elaborate extremes, becoming a perfect outlet for obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Jane Yolen (August 2003)
I have three homes. Two are tangible, wood and stone, rising against quite different skies. And one is my childhood.

Ed Young (August 2006)
Once passion grabs you, you are on your way, because you are no longer determined by "shoulds."

Paul O. Zelinsky On Retelling Fairy Tales in Pictures and Words
There has been probably even more fun in learning about the stories than in illustrating them.