Jacqueline Woodson People Quotations

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

People who don't know what it's like to be an African American don't understand that it's OK, ... I never want to be other than an African American.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.

A lot of times, when people send me books to read - new writers mostly - I find that the book is still in a draft stage and that before it can leave the writer's hands and head to a publisher, it needs about five more revisions. Some people don't want to do that.

I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

I think people are sometime reluctant to read outside of their own race. This is heartbreaking.

The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I actually don't think of whiteness and heterosexuality as 'the norm'. Maybe there are people who still do but none of them are close friends of mine.