I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

Allow me to congratulate you on your very astute powers of observation.

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.

That you can go anywhere in America and get a book from a library is just the most amazing thing in the world. It's not a duty; it's a privilege and it's a joy. That joy is doubled and tripled and quadrupled if you read with other people.

I read whatever the publisher sends me.

The undoing is almost always more difficult than the doing.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call "a piece of work," and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that's the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob's grief.