“I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.”

I didn’t start out writing to give children hope, but I’m glad some of them found it.

He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.

Problem solving, and I don’t mean algebra, seems to be my life’s work. Maybe it’s everyone’s life’s work.

I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

I was an only child; I didn’t have a sister, or sisters.

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.

Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.

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.

I grew up like a neglected weed – ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.

I hope another generation of children don’t have to grow up without understanding the historical context for contemporary racism.⁣

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‘sexy,’ even before I knew what the word was.

I make mistakes growing up. I’m not perfect; I’m not a robot.

I grew up watching jimmy fallon every night with my family.

Everything is so dreamy when you are young. After you grow up it kind of becomes, just real.

I grew up with coconuts as the main flavor in food in Jamaica. It’s part of our culture.