“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.”

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.

In seventh grade…I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom – there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.

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

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

If we didn’t have Nico [Rosberg] and Lewis [Hamilton] in those cars – there’s one or two guys down the field who in those cars would have delivered the same.

We’ve known each other [in Motorpsycho ] since 1985 or ’86, are really different as personalities, and yet have actually never disagreed to any degree. We are really complimentary as musicians and songwriters too, and come from two total opposites in our approaches.

Proponents of so-called pluralism feel compelled to ban religious considerations from public discourse because they know, instinctively if not intellectually, that their faith is in direct conflict with the God of the Bible, and that in the end the two positions are irreconcilable.

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

People are still people, and they make their decisions based on their life experiences and their beliefs. You really can’t divorce the two. It’s important to fight against stereotypes and oversimplifications in very complex people.

I still shop at Costco. I just started tipping two years ago.

The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or the other of them are, respectively, State Socialism and Anarchism.

I don’t want a single state. And I talked about two states where a demilitarized Palestinian state recognizes the Jewish state, and I stand by that. I haven’t retracted my position; I haven’t changed it.