“Children want to do what grownups do.”

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.

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.

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

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