She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.

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.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

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

I am not a pest," Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

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