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

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.

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!

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.

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.

Children want to do what grownups do.

In seventh grade...I found a place on the [library]shelf where my book would be if I ever wrote a book, which I doubted.