I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.

All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.

I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.

If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.

It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.