Children want to do what grownups do.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.