Author

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

Ramona was originally an accidental character I added to the Henry Huggins books because I noticed that none of the characters had siblings. I added Ramona as Beazus' pestering little sister.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

People are usually surprised to hear this, but I don't really read children's books.

I was a librarian.

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.

I rarely read children's books.

I particularly enjoy cello music because our daughter plays the cello. I have listened to her practice for so many hours that I am familiar with the music written for that instrument. I am also fond of the popular music of the 1930s because my future husband and I danced to it so many Saturday nights when we were in college.

Over the years, I have been approached about making Ramona into a cartoon or movie, but I was afraid that no one could really capture the spunky character of Ramona.

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.

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

I don't ever go on the Internet. I don't even know how it works.

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 wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.

I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters.

We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.

I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all.