Jack Prelutsky quotes:

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

In masks and gown we haunt the street And knock on doors for trick or treat Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it's Halloween!

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

It's Halloween! It's Halloween! The moon is full and bright And we shall see what can't be seen On any other night. Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls, Grinning goblins fighting duels Werewolves rising from their tombs, Witches on their magic brooms In masks and gown we haunt the street And knock on doors for trick or treat Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it's Halloween!

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

I'm usually working on eight or 10 things at once.

A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what.

If you don't believe in dragons, It is curiously true That the dragons you disparage Choose to not believe in you.

The BALLPOINT PENGUINS, black and white, Do little else but write and write. Although they've nothing much to say, They write and write it anyway....

His blood is black and boiling hot, he gurgles ghastly groans. He'll cook you in his dinner pot, your skin, your flesh, your bones.

She comes by night, in fearsome flight, in garments black as pitch, the queen of doom upon her broom, the wild and wicked witch.

The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning.