Now I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.

Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.

Star people are rare.

She laughed, and the desert sang.

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac.

They don't live here. They live in Heaven.' Where's that?' I don't know,' I said. 'Enos says it's right here, on this side of the wall, but I never saw an angel over here. Kuba says it's in Russia. Olek says Washington America.' What's Washington America?' Enos says it's a place with no wall and no lice and lots of potatoes.