You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Maurice Sendak
Source: bookofkhidr.com
It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?
A. A. Milne, from Winnie-the-Pooh
Common speech and the plain, workaday words that make it up are, after all, the stock in trade of some of the best fiction writers. They are the principal means by which characters in a novel or story reveal themselves and give voice sometimes to profound feelings and complex ideas about themselves and the world. Perhaps the proper measure of a writer's talent is skill in rendering everyday speech--when it is appropriate to the story--as well as the ability to tap, to exploit, the beauty, poetry and wisdom it often contains.
Paule Marshall, from The Poets in the Kitchen
I wouldn’t be writing the poems if I didn’t think they were leading to a kind of consciousness that would allow one to become more fully awake, even in this period which is trying everything it can to shut one down.
Jorie Graham
Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man writes what he has seen. Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man will not write what he has seen.
— Anne Michaels, Somewhere Night Is Falling