I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.

I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.

Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.

He was the strangest of strangers in that he was also her oldest friend.

It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.

Spiritual maturity is not measured by the years that you have spent in church, rather by your attitude before people different from you.

There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.

For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial.

The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go.

What better way to get to know a culture than to go there and learn their sports?

To make a film you have to dream a film... that's true of poetry as well.

I hope there's a life after life - and maybe I can even come back again and get on another train, and ride and gain some more wisdom.

I sometimes want to make a book of every tattoo I wanted to get before I actually got a tattoo, because there were so many awful ideas and concepts.