In my stories for children, I sometimes show a hard, harsh, dangerous world. I'm going to show you the way it is, but I'm going to also tell you that there's every reason to hope.

While we were working, we were writing about a tall girl and a short girl, which we thought was funny, because Alison's [McGhee] tall and I'm short.

Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer.

You can always trust a dog that likes peanut butter.

And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.

There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

There can be a lot of longevity in the repetition of things being told again and again in a variety of ways.