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When you're a kid, you should be a kid.

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

Maybe I didn't have the childhood people think you should have, but I still went through the ages; I was still a child.

I do think kids should be kids. You have the rest of your life to be an adult.

Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're already an adult and in certain ways you're still a kid.

Watching kids go from the age of 9 and 10 to 13 is a big, huge jump. The way they speak, their looks, their attitudes, everything changes as you go from being a little kid to a teenager.

I got a good-enough adolescence. I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.

When you have a kid, you have to be more mature.

I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that. Don't rush into adulthood, it isn't all that much fun.

Even when I was a child, I always wanted to be older. I realised just in time that it's a mistake and to enjoy my youth while I had it.