When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
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 still have such a thing for leather jackets. I have a closet full of them, and my husband is always saying to me, 'Why do you need another jacket? You have plenty of jackets.'
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.
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 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.
Life goes on if you're one of the lucky ones.
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 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.
I'll always be grateful for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.' It brought me many, many, readers.
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.
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 an optimistic person, so I like to leave my readers with a sense of hopefulness.
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!
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.
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.
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 wildly interested in puberty as a child.
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.
The '50s were a secretive time.
