When I was a child, I wanted to be important.

Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.

I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.

I tell 'Hansel and Gretel' stories about heroic children who are lost in a world that seems friendly at first, and then isn't.

When I was 4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and told my parents there was a witch crying outside in the boxwood bushes. I didn't know who she was or why she was crying, but I was terribly upset.

Sometimes I feel like an impostor, and I have to remind myself, 'You are able to do this.' I look at the books on the shelf that have my name on them to remind myself I have done it before and, likely, I can do it again.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

I'm like a crockpot on low heat. My mind constantly comes up with ideas, but I abandon a lot of them after a week or two. It's the ones that keep coming to me, that keep picking up flavors, that haunt me, those are the ones that wind up getting written.

I became fascinated by marionettes, which I first saw in Venice. They were so haunted and so alive. You walked by them, and you could feel their presence, with their beady eyes just fixed on you.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.