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

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.

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

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.

Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.