“Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.”

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.

[Black Hawk] has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

Ask yourself – Where do I want to be one year from today? Personal growth is a choice.

The hope is they would like to bring it to Broadway next year, so we’ll see that’s to come in the end of the finance year and everybody else and also real estate and what theaters are available at the time but I would like to come back with it.

I’m really thankful and complimented when people come to me and say, thank you for the great times for all these years. But I don’t think about it as being a leader.

If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. Youre not paying attention to whats happening in the universe around you.

My Soul to Keep is the ultimate love story with a black man and a black woman. I call it the ultimate love story. It’s about an immortal.