Speaking at a convention, 1976

“We don’t take [childhood fears] seriously, however. We resent them, or we laugh at them, or we ignore them altogether, either because we cannot understand them and are therefore afraid of them, or because we do understand them and are therefore afraid of them. The result is that, in the novels we write for children, we write about a world that never existed, not for us when we were young, nor for our present-day young audience. We have, in other words, confused childhood with the good old days.”