Children want to do what the grownups do. Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

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.

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 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.

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

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.