'Harry Potter' opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.
This is what happens when you are on the wrong side of 40. Young adults, who could be your children, are now working with you. I was playing their parents or mentor. I started to think: Oh, I am not part of that group any more.
If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.
When you write for very young children what they want is something familiar and safe and stereotyped.
Being in the space that I am as a writer, and just as a black dude in America, there's this push to be cool or be what you're expected to be. There's a need for a song that puts that in perspective. I think that's an important thing for young children to hear growing up.
I do a great deal of work with young children, and if you give a child a problem, he may come up with a highly original solution, because he doesn't have the established route to it.
I get up at 5 A.M., and I train hard. I've got two young children, so I have to get up early. But I like it.
I have five young children, and I take being a role model very seriously.
There have been two areas identified as being vital to reading - and that's for very young children between the ages of one month and five years and for teenagers. I've been trying to find ways of approaching both groups.
I'm not a young kid struggling to get to the top. I've been to the top. I gotta look out for my best interests as a businessman in this fight game. At the end of the day, it is a business. I've got children to take care of; I've got bills to pay.
I jokingly say that the enemies are children, you know. I always say, if you have young kids, your whole goal from the moment they wake up is to make them tired. It's exhausting. Anybody who's got kids knows what I'm talking about.
Younger generations in particular, who have spent a great deal of time in information environments since they were small children, would feel like a fish out of water if they were shut out of the global stream of information.
We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children.
Children are not children. They are just younger people.
I will tell them that you can work hard, you can improve your life and the lives of your children in one day when you deliver your youngest child to the university, you will look her in the eye and say, 'You will give back.'
I think we should bring up our children with much less pressure to compete and get ahead: no comparing one child with another, at home or in school; no grades. Let athletics be primarily for fun, and let them be organized by children and youths themselves.
My father was a particularly zealous Christian Scientist, but young Christian Science children, who have little choice but to believe what their parents are telling them, are taught that illness originates in errors in their parents' and, eventually, their own thinking.
Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used.
I have an office in my house and one about five minutes from my house. I worked solely out of my house for many years, but find, with children, that I have to be in a different ZIP code to think.
Our children... deserve to grow up in an environment where fear is not their constant companion. And I'm determined to do everything I can to make sure every kid - in every neighborhood regardless of zip code, economic status and race or ethnicity - is able to live a life of safety.
