I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

My mom is an art teacher and my dad owns a women's shoe store, so they're not actors by any means. Well, I guess to sell women's shoes, you have to be an actor.

For 13 years, I struggled with education and have only just realised that I was actually struggling to protect myself from it. I was trying to protect my soul.

Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child.

There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of Truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to Truth.