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.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.

Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises.

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

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.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play.

I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.

I grew up before there were strict leash laws.

I feel sometimes that in children's books there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

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

Children want to do what grownups do.

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

I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.

I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.