Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

Why do people not listen when you say no? Why do they think you are too stupid or too young to understand? Why do they think you are too shy to reply? Why do they keep badgering you until you will say yes?

So much depends upon a blue car splattered with mud speeding down the road.

What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: 'What is real? What is truth?' They have to learn it; they don't automatically know it. To them, it's a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

I once fell 20 feet from a tree, was knocked unconscious, and when I picked myself up and straggled home, my parents thought I was making it up. However, when my brother and I fabricated a story about an encounter with a bear, they believed that! So maybe I learned very early on that fiction was more interesting to listeners!