Insert quotation marks whenever you want to indicate the exact words being said or thought by a character in your children's book. Quotation marks come in pairs. Place the opening quotation mark directly before the very first word spoken by a character, verbatim. Place the closing quotation mark immediately following the very last word spoken by a character, verbatim. For example, a passage from H.A. Rey's children's book "Curious George" reads:
George sat on a little stool and the man said, "George, I am going to take you to a big Zoo in a big city. You will like it there. Now run along and play, but don't get into trouble." George promised to be good. But it is easy for little monkeys to forget.
Capitalize the first letter of the character's quote, as if it were the beginning of a new sentence. The only exception to this rule is if you start off paraphrasing what a character is saying, but in the middle or at the end of your paraphrase you insert an exact quote from the character. For example:
Although Timmy was excited about going to his first circus, he stated that he was sure that nothing would've been better than going to the amusement park with his big brother and "riding the rails on the Big Dipper" until he lost his lunch. It sounded like such fun. Why did his parents always have to treat him like such a baby?
Do not insert quotation marks around paraphrased wording. A paraphrase is the rewording of someone else's words in order to communicate the general gist of what was said by them, rather than the exact words attributable to them.
Follow the proper punctuation rules for usage with quotation marks. According to the grammar book "The Confident Writer," a Norton Handbook by Constance J. Gefvert, the rules for using punctuation with quotation marks, in American English, are as follows:
Periods and commas always go inside (the closing) quotation mark.
Colons and semicolons always go outside quotation marks.
Other marks of punctuation (such as question marks and exclamation points) go either inside or outside quotation marks depending on whether they are part of the quoted material.
Set apart which character in the children's book a particular quote is attributed to, from the character's actual quote with a comma. For example:
"I know some good games we could play," said the cat. "I know some new tricks," said the Cat in the Hat. (From Dr. Seuss' children's book "The Cat in the Hat.")