My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

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!

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.

With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.

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.

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.

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.