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

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.

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.

We’re always contradicting ourselves. We want people to tell us apart…. …yet we don’t want them to be able to. We want people to get to know us… …but we also want them to keep their distance.

Four key words–helped make my dreams come true. They are: dedication, balance, risk, and love.

Maintaining spirituality and humanism are the keys to success. Its a balance.

The key to changing our past, present, and future is to create our piece of the PIE (our Perceptions, Interpretations, & Expectations) on purpose.

Until we reflect basic kindness in everything we do, our political gestures will be fleeting and fragile.

The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.

I think that’s the key to being a director: to be able to get the shot and move on quickly.