Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.

Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Some of the things are the same no matter which world you're in, kid. One of 'em is this: The quickest way out of something is usually straight through it.

He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.