“As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.”

Children want to do what grownups do.

She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don’t really read children’s books.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I don’t necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that’s most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.

I feel sometimes that in children’s books there are more and more grim problems, but I don’t know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

I was probably tall as a child, but I just stopped growing.