What interests me is what children go through while 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.

I beg your pardon. Sometimes, it's true I can be stubborn.' 'Sometimes?' she added derisively. 'Quite often, ' he tempered.

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows he breathes but does not live.

Right after 9/11 there was a magazine with a cover of kids, mostly 12-14 year-olds, who were being trained for military combat. I thought that this had just gone too far.

Today, it is more important than ever to raise human consciousness, so that technology becomes a means of empowerment, not destruction.

I grew up playing field hockey and lacrosse - prep school sport - and I was terrible at them.

Never say 'I could have done that,' because you didn't.

Meeting actors and TV personalities is one thing, but I just feel like meeting musicians is the coolest.

My most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure and perpetual.

Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.