I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.

I want to give kids that fall-off-the-bed-laughing feeling. Either that, or the sixth-grade feeling that life is hard - sometimes unbearably hard - and it is ultimately about death. But in the meantime, life can be really funny, too.

One of the best essays I've seen in recent years was by a young woman who wrote about how being chosen to choreograph a high school musical forced her to assume a leadership role she wasn't sure she was ready for - but of course she was.

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.