Parenting & Family Quote by Maxim Gorky

Gorky’s line is less a pep talk for children’s authors than a rebuke to lazy thinking about children. The common condescension is to “simplify”: fewer ideas, smoother edges, moral pre-chewed. Gorky flips it. If you write for children the way you write for adults, “only better,” you’re being asked to raise the bar on clarity, honesty, and craft, not lower it. Kids can smell fakery fast; they don’t have the social training to politely endure it.

The subtext is political as much as literary. Coming out of late-imperial Russia and into the Soviet era, Gorky understood literature as a shaping force, a tool for building citizens. Writing “better” for children means refusing to smuggle in cynicism or sloppiness at the moment readers are forming their sense of reality, justice, and language itself. It’s not about preaching; it’s about respecting the reader’s intelligence before it has the armor of irony.

What makes the aphorism work is its clean provocation. “Only better” is a dare aimed at the writer’s ego: if you can’t be vivid without being vulgar, simple without being simplistic, tender without being sentimental, you don’t actually have control of your art. It also implies a quiet moral standard: adults may tolerate compromise; children deserve precision. In that sense, Gorky isn’t narrowing the audience. He’s demanding a higher definition of literature.