All I Liked To Do When I

Kids Books Grownup Books That's Just Marketing. Books Are Books.

Grown-ups Desperately Need To Feel Safe, And Then They Project Onto The Kids. But What None Of Us Seem To Realize Is How Smart Kids Are. They Don’t Like What We Write For Them, What We Dish Up For Them, Because It’s Vapid, So They’ll Go For The Hard Words, They’ll Go For The Hard Concepts, They’ll Go For The Stuff Where They Can Learn Something. Not Didactic Things, But Passionate Things.

I'm Writing A Poem Right Now About A Nose. I've Always Wanted To Write A Poem About A Nose. But It's A Ludicrous Subject. That's Why, When I Was Younger, I Was Afraid Of [writing] Something That Didn't Make A Lot Of Sense. But Now I'm Not. I Have Nothing To Worry About. It Doesn't Matter.

Children Are Tough, Though We Tend To Think Of Them As Fragile. They Have To Be Tough. Childhood Is Not Easy. We Sentimentalize Children, But They Know What's Real And What's Not. They Understand Metaphor And Symbol. If Children Are Different From Us, They Are More Spontaneous. Grown-up Lives Have Become Overlaid With Dross.

Certainly We Want To Protect Our Children From New And Painful Experiences That Are Beyond Their Emotional Comprehension And That Intensify Anxiety; And To A Point We Can Prevent Premature Exposure To Such Experiences.