If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

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

Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.