Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

A person without curiosity may as well be dead.

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.

I never read the "Bobbsey Twins" or "Boxcar Children."But I did remember being downtown, at the bookstore by myself and having an allowance and spending it on a Nancy Drew mysteries. And I was probably eleven, twelve.

Librarians save lives by handing the right book at the right time to a kid in need.

I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.