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!

You have to understand that during the course of our show, we were a family for five hours a day, five days a week, maybe four days a week. And we experienced the same things that we experienced in our own family.

I think the main parenting or education you do for your children is by way of being, and not by way of having guidelines or some agenda. I think that life itself is constantly bringing learning opportunities.

I had the two best teachers in the world. That was my family.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.