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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids' books.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

I was, without a sliver of a doubt, a no-good, lazy slacker of a child, and after I discovered literature, I was totally and utterly a no-good, lazy slacker of a child who read books. A lot of books, good and bad, but my favourite - the books I read and reread in my teens - were by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

The early readers are in-between books for the kids who aren't ready for novels yet but are done with my picture books. It's really rewarding to think that they can grow up reading my books at all the different levels.