It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.