Norton Juster Quotes

Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.

Freedom is not a license for chaos.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.

What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

Why not? That’s a good reason for almost anything – a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.

Every sunrise gives you a new beginning and a new ending. Let this morning be a new beginning to a better relationship and a new ending to the bad memories. Its an opportunity to enjoy life, breathe freely, think and love. Be grateful for this beautiful day.

Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?

But I suppose there’s a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.

…it’s not just learning that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.

I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that’s about it.

I think really good books can be read by anybody.

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.

So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they’re learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers – for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that’s the distinction.

The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.

People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I’ve never heard of.

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

But I find the best things I do, I do when I’m trying to avoid doing something else I’m supposed to be doing. You know, you’re working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance.

What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.

Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.

And when I’m writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don’t necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I’m working on, because they’re simply my way of getting to know the characters.

Sometimes I find the best way of getting from one place to another is simply to erase everything and begin again.

The only other thing which I think is important is: Don’t write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.

A good book written for children can be read by adults

You must never feel badly about making mistakes … as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.

A good book written for children can be read by adults.

When you’re very young and you learn something – a fact, a piece of information, whatever – it doesn’t connect to anything.