“I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.”

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.

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.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

If you watch me during the game, I celebrate when we press the ball and it goes out.

Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that’s down can come up.

A lot of people cry and complain and put their hand out and beg. It never goes well.

The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy

I’ve had people question my “integrity” based off of something I didn’t post on social media, the list goes on. It’s mind boggling.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.