Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.

Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.

. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

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