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To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.

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

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.

I've known since I was 12 that I wanted to write. My father was a teacher, and there were so many books around, it seemed natural to pick them up.