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

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.

The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.

Whoever raises a righteous child, it is as if he did not die.

It’s a merger of home life and work life. They aren’t that separate, I must confess, and my daughters know an awful lot about childcare reform now because of it.

One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.

My first child is going to be the oldest sibling to the next kid, and that may change with each and every year. I’m looking forward to how one baby influences the other, and to my family as a whole, to every single chapter.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

As God’s child advances spiritually be shall discover that the Lord’s time is as important as the Lord’s will. Do not rashly beget an Ishmael lest he become the greatest enemy to Isaac.