Summoned by books Quotes

“The first introduction of children to worlds of experience beyond their own is through the spoken word; the recited Mother Goose rhyme, the story told. Picture books are the second medium through which their experience is enlarged, and these they can meet on their own ground, without an adult or older child to act as mediary.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by books: essays and speeches by Frances Clarke Sayers

“It is imperative that the writer for children be close to his own childhood. He must remember the quality with which life is endowed in childhood, the peculiar bloom upon experience, the fragrance of the morning, as it were, if he is to speak to children with authority and conviction.
This quality of being close to one's own childhood does not limit an author to the experiences of his own life. The events and time of his childhood will no doubt give him a book or two, but the awareness of his own childhood as an experience in itself, as a state of grace, so to speak, will permeate everything he writes - stories, books of facts, explanations of how television works - everything will be touched off and surrounded by an aura of belief and authenticity.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by books: essays and speeches by Frances Clarke Sayers

“No other group of writers is as subject to direction, pressures, taboos, theories, and doctrines as is the group which writes for children. Some of these pressures are the result of the old honest profit-and-loss motive and we are told how to write what will sell. Much of the pressure comes from a new shibboleth with which the present era is very much concerned, namely "Mass Communication" which I define, in my private mind, as "It doesn't matter how little you say or how shabby the content if only enough people hear you." The taboos, theories, and doctrines have their inception, for the most part, in the altruistic and idealistic drive of people who want to make the world a better place to live in by prescribing their own dogmas for the minds of children; or by the educators, psychologists, and miscellaneous specialists who know what should be said and how to say it and when it should be said. This latter group change their minds about every ten years, thus insuring that no parent will understand the educational system to which his child is submitted.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by books: essays and speeches by Frances Clarke Sayers

“Walt Disney is another big book promoter, and is quite without conscience as to how he waters down, distorts, and vulgarizes such books of high originality and depths of feeling as Pinocchio, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, and what C.S. Lewis calls "the spell of the Dwarfs - the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we had in those days," he says, "before Walt Disney vulgarized the earthmen.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by books: essays and speeches by Frances Clarke Sayers