Judy Blume

When I was growing up in the 1950s, sweaters were a huge thing.

The protests against Harry Potter follow a tradition that has been growing since the early 1980s and often leaves school principals trembling with fear that is then passed down to teachers and librarians.

I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

The women's movement was slow in coming to suburban New Jersey.

Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that's where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for 'Tiger Eyes.'

I'm very good at setting goals and deadlines for myself, so I don't really need that from outside.

I don't think I could set a book in a place without knowing it really well.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

I never thought I wanted to write about the '50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.