Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

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

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

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.