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What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

Jane Yolen

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Jane Yolen
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: February 11
Editor
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jane Hyatt Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen Stemple
Jane H. Yolen Stemple
Makes
Scholars
Book
Scholar
Heart
Decades
Good
Critics
Time
Touch
Like
Question
Head
Books
Debating

More quotes by Jane Yolen

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If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
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The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
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Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.
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Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
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Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.
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Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
Jane Yolen
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A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.
Jane Yolen
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Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Jane Yolen
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Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
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A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
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Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.
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It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
Jane Yolen
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You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.
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They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
Jane Yolen
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Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
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I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
Jane Yolen
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Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
Jane Yolen
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Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.
Jane Yolen
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If you love a waist, you waste a love.
Jane Yolen
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You write to be read. That is the bottom line.
Jane Yolen