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

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.

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 also understand after meeting with a psychologist that there are other alternative ways of disciplining a child that may be more appropriate.

The mere existence of an additional child or children in the family could signify Less.

I realise I’m still a child, though I do feel older.

The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .

Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child.

The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’

It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access