Jeff Kinney quotes:

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  • I had an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother, and though I look back fondly on my childhood, I think that when you've got four siblings sharing the same resources and a single kids' bathroom, it's going to get a little tense at times.

  • My office doubles as a karaoke den for the neighborhood. There are strobe lights and Rock Band plastic guitars, a disco ball and a fog machine and some other things. I have a really long work day, and you might find me doing karaoke by myself late at night.

  • Working with Dav Pilkey was a dream come true. Dav is incredibly funny, and he's been a hero of mine for a long time. It was great bringing the 'Wimpy Kid' and 'Captain Underpants' worlds together!

  • When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.

  • In middle school, I started to draw, and my pencil sketches were huge. They were these 4ft by 3ft drawings, and I got a lot of attention for that, so that was very validating. But I didn't start cartooning until I was in college.

  • With the recent addition of a full soundtrack and the players map, millions of Poptropicans around the globe are now fully immersed in a multimedia gaming experience when they embark on our high quality adventures.

  • I think if everyone would write down the funny stories from their own childhoods, the world would be a better place.

  • Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren't in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his dresser, in easy reach of a kid making a beeline to the bathroom.

  • I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.

  • We're extremely excited to see more than 500,000 friends around the globe be added within the first 12 hours of launching Friends on Poptropica. The reaction has been extremely positive from fans, and we're proud to bring a completely safe friends offering to kids on our virtual world.

  • I draft on the computer. I have a really giant screen that attaches to my laptop, and then I have a humongous digital drawing tablet called a Cintiq. It sits at all different angles, and it's so big that it would take two people to move it.

  • I labored for eight years thinking I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.

  • On the first day of school, you got to be real careful where you sit. You walk into the classroom and just plunk your stuff down on any old desk, and the next thing you know the teacher is saying, 'I hope you all like where you're sitting, because these are your permanent seats.'

  • When I was on the swim team as a kid, I used to hide out from my coach by going into the bathroom and hiding out in one of the stalls. And I would literally wrap myself in toilet paper so as not to get hypothermia.

  • I write for kids because I think the most interesting (and most humorous) stories come from people's childhoods. When I was writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I had a blast talking on the phone to my younger brother, Patrick, remembering all of the things that happened to our family when we were growing up.

  • When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.

  • On our swim team, they had something called the 'developmental meet.' I didn't know it was a meet only for the worst kids so that they could get a ribbon, and I'd show up with my friend who was also a terrible swimmer, and we would be amazed that the best kids hadn't bothered to show up. I didn't get it until after college.

  • If there is any message in the 'Wimpy Kid' books, it is that reading can be and should be fun. As an adult reader, when I see an obvious moral lesson to be taught, I run in the other direction... Kids can sniff out an adult agenda from an early age. I'm writing for entertainment, not to impress literary judges.

  • The key to any good comic strip or television sitcom is to reset the board at the end of the episode because people like familiarity.

  • I'm keeping my day job, because Poptropica is something that really energizes me. I'd love to create a TV series or write a film that's not in the 'Wimpy' universe, but I know it will be difficult to create something from scratch. But I love creating good comedy for kids, so I hope to have another successful venture in the future!

  • When kids get stuck on one of our quests, we now have an app for that. It is so cool to know that now kids can use mobile technology to learn more about Poptropica's great adventures and solve its challenging quests.

  • Kids and adults have a difference of opinion when it comes to what constitutes legitimate reading. Adults often push books that they loved as children, which, ironically, were often books that their parents weren't particularly keen on.

  • I work in the house next to where I live. We bought a smaller house that I use as my office and the place where my two employees work... We've got tens of thousands of letters from kids stored all over the house in places you would usually put dishes and other things like that.

  • I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style that mixed cartoons and 'traditional' writing, and that's how 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' was born.

  • I'm not very charismatic or telegenic. I feel bad for the kids waiting three hours in line for their book to be signed.

  • I'm very excited to see the wonderful 2-D characters in Poptropica come to life in the form of 3-D toys. When I first held the characters in my hands, it felt like magic. I'm excited for kids to have the same feeling!

  • My life is pretty ordinary in so many ways. I live in a town called Plainville. I have the life of an average dad. It feels like I have this secret identity as an author, and it's still very surreal to me.

  • To come out and meet kids who have my books in their hands is kind of amazing.

  • I only work on my books at nights and at weekends. It is really just like a hobby.

  • If I were put into a college lecture hall right now and told to pay attention for 45 minutes, it would be physically impossible for me to do. I'm one of those people who believe that ADD is a gift. It's tough to manage, but if you can harness it you can do great things.

  • I feel lucky I didn't become that newspaper cartoonist I wanted to be because in the U.S. so many newspapers have suffered circulation declines, and some have folded. What's fun about being an author is I reach a much bigger audience, and there is something special about launching a book you've penned.

  • My advice to authors would be to try to do something original rather than to try to anticipate what the market is looking for.

  • We're incredibly excited to welcome the 500 millionth Poptropican into our virtual world. When we started in 2007, we never could have imagined that we'd see a day when half a billion avatars inhabited Poptropica.

  • Dear Aunt Loretta, Thank you so much for the awesome pants! How did you know I wanted that for Christmas? I love the way the pants look on my legs! All my friends will be so jealous that I have my very own pants. Thank you for making this the best Christmas ever! Sincerely, Greg

  • I'm probably something like 95% chicken nugget

  • Then one day, this kid named Darren Walsh touched the Cheese with his finger, and that's what started this thing called the Cheese Touch. It's basically like the Cooties. If you get the Cheese Touch, you're stuck with it until you pass it on to someone else. The only way to protect yourself from the Cheese Touch is to cross your fingers.

  • I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

  • I think goodreads is the best place to look for books

  • Youre gonna grow up and marry some ice cream! Haha!

  • hay he's a great writer and i like him a lot

  • I don't know what a guy needs to do to impress a girl these days.

  • I never thought I was writing for kids at all. It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids, I might actually have spelt things out a bit more, and that would probably have killed the appeal.

  • Kids can sniff out a moral. They can feel the heavy hand of an adult.

  • You can't expect everyone to have the same dedication as you.

  • I'm having a seriously hard time getting used to the fact that summer is over and I have to get out of bed every morning to go to school.

  • So I've started wearing sweatpants to bed because I really don't need Santa seeing me in my underwear.

  • It's not easy to writing thank-you notes for the stuff you didn't want in the first place.

  • Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to, and they don't like it. So while my books aren't amoral, they are not infused with morals or a message, either, and kids like that.

  • I feel, as an adult, I'm very similar to how I was as a pre-teen. Maybe it's a case of arrested development, but I feel like it's easy to slip back into those shoes, and I feel like if we were all magically transported back to our middle school years, we'd all act like we did in middle school.

  • Luckily for me, my father had impeccable taste. No contemporary collector was he. His treasure trove of comics included gems such as 'Little Lulu,' 'Frontline Combat' and 'Classics Illustrated.' But the works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks's 'Donald Duck' and 'Uncle Scrooge' comics from the 1940s through the 1960s.

  • Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.

  • I really wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist, but nobody liked my work. I didn't have the control or flair that was necessary to create something that didn't look childish.

  • There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.

  • I don't think of cartoons or comics as being for kids.

  • I've never run into a person who yearns for their middle school days.

  • I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

  • I remember once I had lunch with George W Bush, his father, and Condoleezza Rice. Then I went home to find my dog and my neighbour's dog fighting over a dead rabbit, and I had to separate them. I like that my home life keeps things real.

  • I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that's helped me in my writing because I'm writing about ordinary things.

  • I think the most satisfying part about filmmaking is seeing a production in full bloom. When I write, I write in isolation.

  • I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.

  • I read the 'Harry Potter' books as I was writing my own books, and I love them, but I don't think Harry was very much like I was as a kid. He's always brave, and he's perfect in a lot of ways.

  • ... no matter how nice you are to some people, they'll turn their back on you the second they get the chance.

  • Because it's our choices that makes us who we are...

  • See, when you're a little kid, nobody ever warns you that you've got an expiration date. One day you're hot stuff and the next day you're a dirt sandwich.

  • You and your group of nerds fall into a pit and it's full of dynamite and you blow up. The End.

  • Well, the problem is, it's not easy for me to think of ways to improve myself, because I'm pretty much one of the best people I know.

  • Monkeys can't talk, stupid!

  • Greg starts a middle school and asks: Why is "bullies" such a big PROBLEM? And says people need to shave twice a day.

  • Holly is the fourth-prettiest girl in the class, but the top 3 all have boyfriends. So a lot of guys like me are doing everything they can to get in good with her.

  • hey guys i would like you to try this book you will love it!

  • I got to give mom credit for how she handled it.She didn't try to pry and get all the details. All she said was that I should try to do "the right thing" because it's our choices that make us who we are. I figure that's pretty decent advice. But I'm still not 100% sure what I'm going to do tomorrow.

  • hope your birthday is hot hot hot

  • Chirag: Rowley, do you think I exist? Rowley: Nope! I can't even hear you or see you!

  • When you're used to having electricity and then all of a sudden it's taken away, you're basically just one step from being a wild animal.

  • I labored for eight years thinking that I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.

  • When I first learned about Abrams and saw the types of books they were making, I knew I wanted my books to be published by them. Abrams books are special-when you hold one in your hands, you have the feeling that this book needed to be made. I once heard an artist say that books are fetish objects-I think Abrams gets that, because their books demand to be treasured. So who better to give comics art its proper due? I feel privileged to have found a home with Abrams.

  • Back in those days it was just me swimming around in the dark, doing back flips and taking naps whenever I want.

  • He got the crib, so for the first few months of my life I had to sleep in the top dresser drawer, which I'm pretty sure isn't even legal.

  • Mom is always saying I'm a smart kid, but that I just don't apply myself.

  • The only reason I get out of bed at all on weekends is because eventually I can't stand the taste of my own breath any more.

  • I think humor is key [to a successful middle-grade novel]. Kids like to read for entertainment, and the best way to entertain kids is to make them laugh.

  • I realised all the good ideas were taken before I was even born.

  • I've seen a lot of movies where a kid my age finds out he's got magical powers and then gets invited to go away to some special school. Well, if I've got an invitation coming, now would be the perfect time to get it

  • First of all, let me get this straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY told her to get one that didn't say 'diary' on it.

  • If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all.

  • that if you don't read nobody does

  • I think Diary of a Wimpy kidis sooooo good!!!!!!!

  • So if you want to find somebody to blame for the way i am, I guess you'd have to start with the public education system.

  • I didn't really know what to expect from detention but when I waked into the room, the first thought I had was, I don't belong in here with these future criminals.

  • hot pink looks cute on only janet which is MEEEEEEE!!!

  • But the thing I'm finding out is some people don't really appreciate it when you'r trying to be helpful.

  • The best person I know is Myself.

  • I don't know if this makes me a bad person or whatever, but it's hard for me to get interested in other people's vacations.

  • I`m basically one of the best people I know.

  • fish and visitors stink in 3 days.

  • I'll be famous one day, but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons." - Greg Heffley,

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