Aunt Quote by John Updike

“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray,…

— Anna Quindlen

Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was 'Pinocchio.' My mother read it to me every day before naptime when I was…

— R. L. Stine

“No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and…

— John Berwick Harwood

I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick…

— Gillian Flynn

Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I've got…

— Gary Paulsen

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I…

— Gretchen Rubin

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we…

— Edwidge Danticat

Fanny and Alexander' blew me away. I was visiting my sister in her first year at university. It was my first foray into something…

— Emily Maitlis

My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I…

— Michael Rosen

“By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading—and therefore writing—adventure…

— Téa Obreht

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child.

— Wu Cheng'en

Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.

— Jenny Zhang