Quote

Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.

Girls read a boy book, but boys don't necessarily want to read a girl book.

Boys are quite often whimsical. Whereas girls are modest by nature and know their responsibilities very well. Their weapons are service, sacrifice, and love, by which they conquer over the males.

I've lived with boys and girls, and I find that boys are generally cleaner than girls. Generally! This is a big generalization!

Having boys is different. Boys, you put sneakers on, and they're out, they're ready. Girls, you gotta pay a little bit more attention to them.

We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.

For the longest time, you couldn't even say boys and girls were different. It was taboo in the educational world.

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.

I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.