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

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

When things [writing] are over, I always think, ‘well, I’m never going to do anything again because I have no ideas so I’m going to go be a farmer’. Or else ideas will come and and if not then I become a farmer. Hopefully won’t happen.

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents’ Night.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother’s cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

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.

And all means of discovering them are equally admissible.

This means trying to bring values into environments, buildings, and contexts that improve the quality of life for future generations.

Life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to be shuffled through as best as we can but a lofty and exalted destiny.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

For then only will you be strong, when you cherish the laws, and when the revolutionary attempts of lawless men shall have ceased.

I love laugh lines. It means you’ve had a good life.

Christian love means two things at once: to recognize the Lord in one’s neighbor and to recognize one’s neighbor in the Lord.