Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.

My first publication was a haiku in a children's magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.

God bless Interlibrary Loan. I pay a lot of library fines. In the case of 'A Single Shard,' I was using books that hadn't been checked out in 30 years, so I didn't feel too bad.

In my family and among Korean-Americans, there just is no occasion that people would get together without bibimbap. It's something that people eat when they're wanting to celebrate or have a good time with friends.

If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.