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Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

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.

'Harry Potter' made it cool to read children's fiction, and 'Twilight' did the same for a slightly older age group. What I'm seeing is mothers and daughters who love to read the same books.

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.

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

I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

Kids definitely go into bookstores after reading 'Twilight' and want something else like it.

I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.