Norton Juster Quotes (36 Quotes)

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.

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

Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty.

Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.

Expect everything so that nothing comes unexpected.

You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.

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

You see, to tall men I'm a midget, and to short men I'm a giant; to the skinny ones I'm a fat man, and to the fat ones I'm a thin man.

Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going.

You see. . . it's really quite strenuous doing nothing all day, so once a week we take a holiday and go nowhere, which was just where we were going when you came along. Would you care to join us?

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

I don't know of any wrong road to Dictionopolis, so if this road goes to Dictionopolis at all it must be the right road, and if it doesn't it must be the right road to somewhere else, because there are no wrong roads to anywhere. Do you think it will rain?

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.

It's bad enough wasting time without killing it.

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

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

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

They all looked very much like the residents of any small valley to which you've never been.

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.

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.

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.

I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.

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.

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.

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

I think really good books can be read by anybody.