You think everything can be magically cured with vitamins?” “Everything but us.

"Margaret" was just my truth. It was what I knew to be true about sixth grade.

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!

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

I know where "Blubber" came from. It came from stories that my daughter told me when she came home from fifth grade. There was a kid in the class who was being bullied. We didn't even call it bullying then, that's what's so weird. Victimization in the classroom. The word bully was so out, was so not in use for all those years and now it's back big time.

If all you leave in the library is books that you think speak to everyone, what are you going to have? You'd have nothing.

[With "Summer Sisters" the publisher] sent me on a big book tour. And it was the most wonderful professional experience of my life. I mean it was like Kleenex on every table wherever I was, friends patting friends on the back and they'd cry and I'd cry.