Richard Peck

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.

Only the nonreader fears books.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.