Their Lost Voices Must Continue To Be

With The Adult Ones, I Feel I Need To Get As Deep Inside The Psychology Of A Character As I Can, And That Needs To Be First-person. In The Children's Books, I Feel I Need Some Distance. I Don't Want To Be The Nine-year-old At The Center Of The Story. I Need To Have Some Type Of Narrative Voice.

In His Heart, He Knew That There Was No Reason To Be Impolite To Someone, Even If They Did Work For You. There Was Such A Thing As Manners After All.

I Started Reading Dickens When I Was About 12, And I Particularly Liked All Of The Orphan Books. I Always Liked Books About Young People Who Are Left On Their Own With The World, And The Four Children's Books I've Written Feature That Very Thing: Children That Are Abandoned By Their Families Or Running Away From Their Families Or Ignored By Their Families And Having To Grow Up Quicker Than They Should, Like David Copperfield - Having To Be The Hero Of Their Own Story.

There's Things That Happen In A Person's Life That Are So Scorched In The Memory And Burned Into The Heart That There's No Forgetting Them.

Unless You're Very Boring, I Think Most People Who've Lived Long Enough Have Something In Their Past Which Will Never Go Away. As A Writer, My Interest Has Become In Writing About Much More Emotional, Personal Topics. I'm Trying To Reach Into Subjects I Have Never Written About Before.