Jack Prelutsky Quotes

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• I’m never bored.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

• 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.

  Jack Prelutsky

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

  Jack Prelutsky

Jack Prelutsky (24)

Birth:	8th September, 1940
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Poet

About

Jack Prelutsky was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He is an American writer of children's poetry. He studied at The High School of Music & Art and Hunter College, Manhattan, New York City. He has written more than 50 poetry collections, including Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep, It's Halloween, The Mean Old Mean Hyena, and Something BIG Has Been Here. He has also set his poems to music on the audio versions of his anthologies. He appeared on the popular animated television series Arthur, in the episode "I'm a Poet." In 2006, the Poetry Foundation named Prelutsky the inaugural winner of the Children's Poet Laureate award. He married Carolynn in 1979.

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Deaths

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• 1942 - Lucy Maud Montgomery
• 1947 - Willa Sibert Cather
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