If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.

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

The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else--grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.

Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.

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.

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.