Words matter. These are the best Judith Viorst Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I could be such a wonderful wife to another wife’s husband.
My Girl Scout leader. She told me if I listened more and talked less, I could grow up to be a good writer. I thought that was interesting advice at age 12.
I like to take all my feelings and thoughts and put them down in different ways on paper.
My mother would have been so crazy about my grandchildren. She was a fabulous grandmother, and she would have been absolutely crazed as a great-grandmother. I miss that part of her.
Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational – but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
The best I can do is, it’s like a ‘ding!’ You’re writing, and then something starts falling into place, and you hear or feel a ding. And it just feels – it’s going to be okay.
Most of the characters I have in my children’s books are grouchy or annoyed about something or are calling each other unfriendly names. Like my own kids, they’re not honeys and sweetie pies and little angels. They’re kids. Sloppy, dirty, stinky.
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there.
You could never plan your life in a million years.
One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.
I actually sat down and started three Alexanders at the same time. Two of them went in the trash and got stomped on because I hated the idea so much. And the one I came up with, I got very excited by. And that’s ‘Alexander, Who’s Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever’.
When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he’s dead.
The years that remain are clearly limited. When you’re 80, you attend a lot more funerals. A lot more people are having a hard time and are ill.
My favorite was ‘The Secret Garden’. I loved it, and I think it’s had a big influence on all of my characters. ‘The Secret Garden’ is about transgressions and imperfect people.
I wrote ‘And Two Boys Booed’ several years ago, but we really chased around looking for the perfect illustrator, so it took a while.
My mother was a huge, huge reader. I think I picked up very early how precious it was to write things in books and have people like my mother glued to the page.
Starting after 60, I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It’s going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?’ But I found plenty to laugh about.
I thought that the 40s was a tough decade, because it’s when you finally figure out that you’re not immortal, when you really start seeing that certain options are closed to you forever: You’re not going to be a brain surgeon; you’re not going to be a ballerina.
Kids need to encounter kids like themselves – kids who can sometimes be crabby and fresh and rebellious, kids who talk back and disobey, tell fibs and get into trouble, and are nonetheless still likable and redeemable.
What kind of grandmother am I? I’m a ‘three-dessert’ grandmother. I’m a ‘let’s just skip the bath tonight, honey, watch another video’ grandmother.
I didn’t get one word published until I was well into my 30s. But I always tried.
Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.
All along, I’ve been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.
Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands – and then eat just one of the pieces.
Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.
‘Alexander, Who’s Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever’ was inspired by a combination of my grandson, my son, and myself – all those times when each of us has decided that we’re just not going to get into trouble anymore. But it’s so hard to be good all of the time!
My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.
In history class, I wrote a poem, ‘The Royalists and the Roundheads.’ I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.
