children
I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
interview by David Salle, in Interview magazine.
In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson—as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 9–10.
To enter the world of a child (or a cat) the least you must do is sit down on the ground without interrupting the child in whatever he is doing, and wait for him to notice you. It will then be the child who makes contact with you, and you (being older, and I hope not older in vain) with your higher intelligence will be able to understand his needs and his interests, which are by no means confined to the bottle and the potty. He is trying to understand the world he is living in, he is groping his way ahead from one experience to the next, always curious and wanting to know everything.
Design as Art (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2008), 93.
Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and then throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.
“Play It Like Your Hair’s On Fire,” by Elizabeth Gilbert in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), 100.
I don’t write for children. I write—and somebody says, “that’s for children.”
“Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Part 1,” The Colbert Report, January 24, 2012.
We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
“Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1904), 316.
The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the “smart” compliment—is that is misrepresents the neural reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activity, which is learning from mistakes. Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
How We Decide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 53–54.
Rose, where did you get that red?
Poem written by an elementary school student, in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children, by Kenneth Koch (New York: Vintage, 1974), 39.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
“How Will You Measure Your Life?,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2010.