He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I am not a pest," Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

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

Didn't the people who made those license plates care about little girls named Ramona?

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 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.