23 Quotes by Charles J. Shields

'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for more than eighty weeks. In 1961, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A film adaptation was released in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, and received three Academy Awards.

Bernard Vonnegut, named for his paternal grandfather, was born August 29, 1914. He was a serious-looking little boy, even in informal photographs.

Edith Vonnegut behaved like a guest in her children's lives. To her way of thinking, parenting came under the general heading of household tasks, which, as a wealthy woman, she could pay others to do.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

The first article carrying Vonnegut's byline, 'This Business of Whistle Purchasing,' a lighthearted criticism of a school fund-raiser, was submitted at the urging of his sophomore English teacher.

The Kansas state motto, “Ad astra per aspera” – To the stars through difficulties.

I think part of your success lies in the shock of recognition- or as the Japanese might say, ‘the unexpected recognition of the faithful “suchness” of very ordinary things’.