Kids tell me all the time, "I don't know how you do it, but that's us in the book." That's the kind of response you want, and I can't sacrifice it for the sake of somebody worried about censorship. You have to find a way to be truthful and honest.

You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

A man I know who writes and aspires to be a novelist does very little reading, and he's not that successful. But I think it's because he's like the kid who wants to be a ballplayer and never goes to the ballpark or tries to hit a ball. So I'd say reading is the most important thing that I do, besides the actual writing. I'm always asking as I read, "How did the writer do this? Why do I suddenly have tears in my eyes? Why am I crying?"

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

I don't think I began to be a professional writer until I learned my weaknesses and what I couldn't do. This forced me to compensate.

The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.