Don't stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don't forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.

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 grew up before there were strict leash laws.

I feel sometimes that in children's books there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

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.

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.