When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

I want kids to think that reading can be just as much fun and more so than TV or video games or whatever else they do. I think any other kind of message or morals that I might teach is secondary to first just enjoying a book.

Toni hears voices," said Trapp. "But who is this Dr. Ellsworth to tell her she's a schizophrenic? Maybe she just perceives better than the rest of us. Maybe the voices she hears are just uncommunicated ideas, floating free.

When anything bad happens to me or someone I know, I always know who to blame. My no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.

Not counting Small Steps, I think Holes is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn’t changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I’m still too close to Small Steps to compare it to Holes.

If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies." While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the moo-oo-oon, "If only, If only.