I Used To Sit Home With My

You Burn The Paper, But Not The Words. You Silence The Words, But Not The Thoughts. You Kill The Thoughts Only If You Kill The Man. And You Will Find That His Thoughts Rise Again In The Minds Of Others - Twice As Strong As Before.

My First Publication Was A Haiku In A Children's Magazine When I Was 9 Years Old. I Received One Dollar For It! I Gave The Check To My Dad For Christmas, And He Framed It And Hung It Over His Desk.

Each Of My Books Has Taken Me A Different Length Of Time To Write - Eight Months For Seesaw Girl, Eight Months For Shard, Three Years For When My Name Was Keoko! The Publisher Takes Another Year And A Half To Work On The Book, So Altogether Each Book Can Take Up To Three Or Four Years To Publish.

If A Man Is Keeping An Idea To Himself, And That Idea Is Taken By Stealth Or Trickery-i Say It Is Stealing. But Once A Man Has Revealed His Idea To Others, It Is No Longer His Alone. It Belongs To The World.

I Often Have Trouble Falling Asleep At Night, So When I'm Lying In Bed I Think Up Stories. That's Where I Do A Lot Of My Thinking. I Also Get A Lot Of Ideas While I'm Reading - Sometimes Reading Someone Else's Stories Will Make Me Think Of One Of My Own.