Travel teaches as much as books.

Before we had the kids my husband and I were traveling a lot and working and really enjoying our lives and each other. We both love the theater and books and travel and so we were really having a lot of fun.

Travel books are by and large boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact fiction and autobiography.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter ' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish we should be thankful for them.

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book ' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

We're competing with everything: the beach the mall bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now caught between two forces the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.

The reason is that till date in spite of advances in information technology and strategies of information the written word in the form of books still remains one of humanity's most enduring legacies.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre you get them one of her books.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

When I was a teacher teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.

Study how water flows in a valley stream smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains rivers plants and trees - should be your teacher.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

I learned easily and had time to follow my inclination for sports (light athletics and skiing) and chemistry which I taught myself by reading all textbooks I could get.