Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.