“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.”

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.

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.

You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!

Conditions are seldom ideal, and if one waits long enough for ideal conditions one is just making excuses.

What I try to get physically healthy people to understand is that they’re going to die someday. There is no way out. And dying isn’t failure, but not living is, so make use of your time. Don’t keeping waiting.

I’m calm and focused and I can’t wait for the biggest sport event in the World to begin.

Wait, Wikipedia isn’t working? Why hasn’t someone invented a paper version of it? A set of books organized alphabetically by topic?

I want to play a villain – I can’t wait to play a villain.

I’d love to travel more. I really look forward to traveling with my kids. I’m just waiting for them to want to travel with me.

It’s part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than it being just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.