I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

My fifth grade teacher Mr. Straussberger noticed I was having trouble with some of my book reports, but he knew I loved to draw. He gave me extra credit if I did a drawing from the book that I was reading.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.