On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.