Like my mother said, you can't go back to holding hands

I thought ["Summer Sisters" ] would be a children's book - two girls who summer together from very different backgrounds. And then when it just kept going and going and going. They kept getting older.

I wasn't interested in the kinds of books that I thought I should be reading.

I was shy, but I stood up in front of the class and I gave my report.I was reporting on books that I didn't want to read. I was inventing books that I didn't want to read.

It didn't happen in the 70s. So I had a whole decade when I was writing these books and maybe there was a little bit here or there but there was no big effort to ban books.

Ideas come from everywhere - they come from what you see and hear and imagine.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.