The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

You cannot identify an enemy without becoming one.

One the advantages about this life is that you can hate someone without knowing him

Listening actively confirms for people that you are positively receiving and thoroughly understanding the message they are conveying.

I always wanted to be a golfer, only I realised that if I'd played golf I would have been skint.

And sometimes the question that you pose or the project that you start yourself turns into something else, you know, but at least it gets you started.

The race doesn't always belong to the swift nor the battle to the strong. It belongs rather to those who run the race, who stay the course and who fight the good fight.

It is the greatest pleasure of living to win souls to Christ.

Especially in a world that doesn't need homemade anything.That's when we need homemade everything.

If you were on the phone with me and Tommy right now, we would probably forget you were there, we'd just be cracking jokes. It's like Beavis and Butthead.

Swing will never sound as good as it did in the '40s.