“A good writer is always a people watcher.”

“A novel is about people.”

“After each book, I get panicky. I don't love the reviews. I don't like going through all that, and you would think that, after almost 40 years of writing, I'd have got the hang of it.”

“Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.”

“As a child who loved to read, I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading.”

“At the time I wrote 'Forever,' I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.”

“By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.”

“Everybody wants to share life and be in love and be loved.”

“Fear is contagious, and those who wish America to become a faith-based society are doing their best to spread it.”

“Here's the thing: If you don't want your kids to read a book, fine. You can tell them not to read a book, and maybe they will and maybe they won't. But you can't say what other kids can read.”

“I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'”

“I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter,' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.”

“I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.”

“I am very sentimental, very emotional, but never in my writing; I am very tough.”

“I believe that 'The Artist' is the kind of movie you see and you don't forget. I know it's going to stay with me.”

“I can't relate to people who treat me as a 'famous person.' I only like to hang around with people who treat me as a regular person because that's what I am. All people are really just regular.”

“I can't see an autobiography in my future. But who knows what might happen.”

“I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.”

“I discovered the National Coalition Against Censorship when I felt totally alone in my fight to protect intellectual freedom, and that group changed my life. I was no longer alone.”

“I do quite a bit of traveling. But sometimes I just want to stay at home!”

“I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.”

“I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.”

“I don't have anything new to say about teenagers.”

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

“I don't think it's realistic to say kids shouldn't watch any TV. I just wish the shows would be better. And that kids would watch less. Get out there and do things, kids! Don't become couch potatoes!”

“I don't think people change; electronics change, the things we have change, but the way we live doesn't change.”

“I don't want to repeat myself.”

“I dread first drafts! I worry each day that it won't come, that nothing will happen.”

“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 have a great T-shirt that I received at the New Jersey Hall of Fame when I was inducted. It says - it makes me choke up - it says, 'I'm a Jersey tomato'... I am. I am a Jersey girl and proud of it.”

“I have the most loyal readers in the world.”

“I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.”

“I love to watch movies.”

“I loved 'Moneyball,' I thought that was a great Hollywood movie. I like baseball, but I don't know that you have to like baseball to like that. I thought it was really well done.”

“I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.”

“I meet people on the street or at book signings and they tend to treat me as if they know me, as if we're connected. It's great.”

“I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.”

“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.”

“I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote 'Smart Women.' I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.”

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

“I used to love getting on planes. I loved the packing and going places. Now I don't because I've developed these really bad sinuses. I have to take a prednisone to fly, but it works, and I'm OK.”

“I used to read about people who'd say, 'I dream my books, and then I write them down.' And I was like, 'Oh, please.'”

“I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.”

“I was a fearful kid and, for some crazy reason, a pretty fearless writer.”

“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.”

“I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary's funny and wonderful books.”

“I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.”

“I was wildly interested in puberty as a child.”

“I wasn't that good at science, and I gave up on math long before I should have. I like to think if I were in school today that would be different.”

“I wish I could prevent my kids from making all the mistakes I've made. But I can't do that. No parent can.”

“I wish I'd gone to a small liberal-arts college where I'd have read the great books instead of a large university where I majored in early-childhood education.”

“I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.”

“Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination.”

“If only there was a vaccine to protect against breast cancer, we'd be lining up - wouldn't we?”

“If those of us who care about making our own decisions about what to read and what to think don't take a stand, others will decide for us.”

“I'll always be grateful for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.' It brought me many, many, readers.”

“I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.”

“I'm an Obama chick.”

“I'm an optimistic person, so I like to leave my readers with a sense of hopefulness.”

“I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.”

“I'm not good at keeping secrets.”

“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!”

“I'm thinking of sending out censorship packets: information to share with those who want to defend my books when they come under fire. I'll tell why I wrote them and include reviews and letters of support from children and their parents.”

“I'm very lucky in that my agent and my editors know better. They don't push me. Because I don't take that well.”

“In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.”

“It's all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it's that determination.”

“It's good to have fantasies and creative fantasies, especially.”

“It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.”

“I've never been one to let others decide what's right for me or my children.”

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.”

“Life goes on if you're one of the lucky ones.”

“Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' has been targeted by censors for promoting New Ageism, and Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' for promoting racism. Gee, where does that leave the kids?”

“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.'”

“My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.”

“My father died when I was still in college, and it was sudden, and he was my beloved parent, and you just can't imagine what you life is going to be like.”

“My father was the youngest of seven, and nobody lived to be 60. And so we were always sitting shiva in my house, and my father would say, 'Life goes on.'”

“My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!”

“My husband is a feminist!”

“My kids both had acne, and I never saw a book dealing with the subject.”

“My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.”

“Parents still have a big influence on their kids - just ask any therapist. No, really, I think the parent is the most important influence on children: It's how they learn to love and treat other people.”

“The '50s were a secretive time.”

“The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.”

“The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”

“The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.”

“The creative process; I enjoy thinking up the stories and situations for my books.”

“The list of gifted teachers and librarians who find their jobs in jeopardy for defending their students' right to read, to imagine, to question, grows every year.”

“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.”

“We can have our beliefs and still read and discuss things.”

“We're supposed to be uncomfortable when we read something. That's how we learn.”

“What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.”

“What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.”

“When a parent comes into school waving a book and saying, 'Take this book away. I don't like this book.' I won't say in all cases, but in many cases, that will not happen anymore. It has to go through a proper review board. The complaining parent will have to fill out a complaint, you know, put it in writing.”

“When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.”

“When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!”

“When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of 'Forever,' I know what's coming. They'll say to me, 'How old do I have to be to read this?' hoping I'll give them permission. But I can't do that.”

“When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.”

“When I was first writing, my little prayers were, 'Please, please, please. Let something be published someday.' Then it went to, 'Please, please, please. Let somebody read this.'”

“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.”

“When I was young, I loved a series of books by an author called Maud Hart Lovelace and the series, which is still around, I'm happy to say, is - they're the 'Betsy-Tacy' books.”

“When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.”

“When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.”

“You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.”

“You're supposed to be challenged in college.”