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Norton Juster Quotes

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.
Norton Juster
Freedom is not a license for chaos.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.
Norton Juster
What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
Norton Juster
Why not? That’s a good reason for almost anything – a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
Norton Juster
But I suppose there’s a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.
Norton Juster
…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.
Norton Juster
I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that’s about it.
Norton Juster
I think really good books can be read by anybody.
Norton Juster
The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.
Norton Juster
So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.
Norton Juster
A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
There are good books and there are bad books, period, that’s the distinction.
Norton Juster
The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.
Norton Juster
People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I’ve never heard of.
Norton Juster
There are no wrong roads to anywhere.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.
Norton Juster
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
Sometimes I find the best way of getting from one place to another is simply to erase everything and begin again.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
A good book written for children can be read by adults
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
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.
Norton Juster
A good book written for children can be read by adults.
Norton Juster
When you’re very young and you learn something – a fact, a piece of information, whatever – it doesn’t connect to anything.
Norton Juster