After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.
Interpretation
Books can transport readers to unique worlds and introduce them to interesting characters.
E. L. Konigsburg emphasizes the power of literature to engage children's imaginations by taking them to extraordinary settings and allowing them to encounter fascinating characters. Winning the Newbery Medal reinforced her belief in the importance of storytelling that challenges the norms and intrigues young minds, showing that readers appreciate adventures in unexpected places with distinctive individuals.
In practice
This quote can inspire a reading program aimed at encouraging children to explore diverse literature.
The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.
I'm not sure that love and like aren't like cats and dogs: One can't grow up to be the other, but they can be taught to live under the same roof.
I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.
Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.
Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time.
Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
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