I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.

Children want to do what grownups do.

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 write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.

Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.