One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

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 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.

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.

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.

Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.