If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

The thing that would make me happy is to live in Geoffrey Stoner’s world.

I want you here. I don't care if it's a hundred degrees and every blade of grass dies. Without you, none of that matters to me.

What would I do to possess her? Would I change my cellular structure? Turn my back on my identity?

I know I can still play, but it's like I told my wife, I'm just tired mentally. I'm just tired.

I don't shop because I need something, I just shop for shopping's sake.

Real freedom is not something to be acquired, it is the outcome of intelligence.

It could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore.

The attention toward me is basically because of what we've built as a company. If we built a pile of crap then nobody would care what I ate for lunch.

I am catholic. And I don't like to see catholicism being brought into disrepute by those in charge who don't seem to believe in God at all... they act like they don't think God is watching.

A pal is one that is aware you while you are, understands where you have already been, accepts whatever you are becoming, and continue to, carefully means that you can develop.