Richard Peck

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“Only the nonreader fears books.”

“[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.”