Top 66 Judy Blume Quotes

I can’t see an autobiography in my future. But who knows what might happen.

The women’s movement was slow in coming to suburban New Jersey.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

I can’t see an autobiography in my future. But who knows what might happen.

I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary’s funny and wonderful books.

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.

My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!

I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.

I don’t do issue writing. I do character writing.

I dread first drafts! I worry each day that it won’t come, that nothing will happen.

Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.

The ’50s were a secretive time.

I don’t think I could set a book in a place without knowing it really well.

I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, ‘Judy, we need a title.’

It’s good to have fantasies and creative fantasies, especially.

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

I believe that ‘The Artist’ is the kind of movie you see and you don’t forget. I know it’s going to stay with me.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother – and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

I was wildly interested in puberty as a child.

I still have such a thing for leather jackets. I have a closet full of them, and my husband is always saying to me, ‘Why do you need another jacket? You have plenty of jackets.’

I do quite a bit of traveling. But sometimes I just want to stay at home!

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

When I’m writing, I’m never trying to teach anything – maybe I’m trying to illuminate.

Nobody talks about housewives anymore! This is what we were supposed to do in the ’50s. Not everybody, but in my milieu. My crowd. You went to college, and you got a degree in case, God forbid, you ever had to work. And you better find somebody to marry while you’re there, because otherwise, what’s going to become of you?

Everybody wants to share life and be in love and be loved.

I don’t deal with writer’s block, I don’t allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.

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.

I used to read about people who’d say, ‘I dream my books, and then I write them down.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, please.’

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.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I’m writing.

You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don’t have enough time to just sit and daydream.

I’m very good at setting goals and deadlines for myself, so I don’t really need that from outside.

By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents’ books because there weren’t teenage books then.

It embarrasses me to flaunt anything good written about me or my books. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about that.

I loved ‘Moneyball,’ I thought that was a great Hollywood movie. I like baseball, but I don’t know that you have to like baseball to like that. I thought it was really well done.

At the time I wrote ‘Forever,’ I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.

I’m very lucky in that my agent and my editors know better. They don’t push me. Because I don’t take that well.

It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

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.

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.’

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 meet people on the street or at book signings and they tend to treat me as if they know me, as if we’re connected. It’s great.

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.

When I’m writing a book, you can’t think about your audience. You’re going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You’re got to write from deep inside.

I never thought I wanted to write about the ’50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.

I’ve never been one to let others decide what’s right for me or my children.

My kids both had acne, and I never saw a book dealing with the subject.

It’s all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it’s that determination.

The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.

The protests against Harry Potter follow a tradition that has been growing since the early 1980s and often leaves school principals trembling with fear that is then passed down to teachers and librarians.

I’m not the world’s best mother, though kids always assume I must be.

I was a fearful kid and, for some crazy reason, a pretty fearless writer.

I am a big defender of ‘Harry Potter,’ and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.

I’m phobic about thunderstorms.

In sixth grade, I made up books to give book reports on.

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’m not good at keeping secrets.

I was always a storyteller. I just didn’t know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can’t remember a time when they weren’t there.

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 think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That’s why I wrote ‘Smart Women.’ I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.

The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students’ right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.

As a child who loved to read, I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading.

When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of ‘Forever,’ I know what’s coming. They’ll say to me, ‘How old do I have to be to read this?’ hoping I’ll give them permission. But I can’t do that.

I’m an e-mail junkie though I’m trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

Parents still have a big influence on their kids – just ask any therapist. No, really, I think the parent is the most important influence on children: It’s how they learn to love and treat other people.