With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.

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

I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.

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 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.

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!

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.