Kids are super-independent. This is the time when you don't need your parents for a story anymore. You have a great degree of agency and independence.

If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.

The difference between children and adults is that they're shorter - not dumber.

All of the life-changing awesome words and pictures and ideas inside your library are useless without just one word outside your library: Open.

My favorite book is my next one. I’m always hoping to make my next book my best one.

An artist is waiting for the audience to understand the work. A craftsman is working to understand the audience.

The first bowl of chocolate pudding was too hot, but Goldilocks ate it all anyway because, hey, it's chocolate pudding, right?

Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words.

When you make a decision, you don't have to be locked into it. One of the ways that you grow is by starting over.

Aggle flabble kabble . . . snurp?

I bet your mom would let me." -Pigeon, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus-

She sat in her perfect house, with her perfect husband, wishing that her perfect life would end.

You are a child of the universeCome to choose how to live here.You are a child of the universeLoved beyond measure.

The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.

Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

It was a fortunate moment in history that I happened to be in. There was a confluence of the internet and all this other stuff that I was able to capitalize on.

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

No one has invented a condom for the pen yet. My pen is still sexy.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

But when she got undressed, it was a big old mess, Sheena was a man...