Richard Peck Quotes

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

I read because one life isn't enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.

Only the nonreader fears books.

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.

When I read a good book, it's like traveling the world without ever leaving my chair.

This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.

But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.

If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.

I read.. because one life is not enough

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.

I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.

Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood.

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.