Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.
There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.
You can't always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.
If you have no intention of loving or being loved, the whole journey is pointless.
Nothing would be easier without you, because you are everything, all of it- sprinkles, quarks, giant donuts, eggs sunny-side up- you are the ever-expanding universe to me.
Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope when there is really no reason to hope at all? Or is it (as the soldier said about happiness) something that you might just as well do, since,in the end, it really makes no difference to anyone but you?
And hope is like love...a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing.
Perhaps what matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down but who picks us up.
The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.
There's this amplification that happens anytime you tell a story. You let it go out into the world. It's the most beautiful thing. All I can do is look at it in wonder and amazement.
Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
I was a kid who loved to read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't have one favorite book. I had lots of favorite books: 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton, 'Paddington' by Michael Bond, 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'Stuart Little' by EB White, 'A Cricket in Times Square,' all the Beverly Cleary books.
Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.
I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.
I am single and childless, but I have lots of friends and I am an aunt to three lovely children.
'Island of the Blue Dolphins' by Scott O'Dell had a huge impact on me.
I always have a notebook with me, I eavesdrop; I write down what people say. It's very rare that one of those things will provoke a story, but I think that that kind of paying attention all the time, and keeping everything open, lets the stories come in. But where they come from is still a mystery to me.
It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.
So much of writing is like walking down a dark hallway with your arms out in front of you. You bump into a lot of things.
To me, this is one of the great things about writing kids' books: the illustrations.
