I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters.

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

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!

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.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.