In the end I never set out deliberately to write a book. It just 'happened.' One spring I was looking over my notebook of plots for a short serial I had been asked to write for a Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before: 'Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.' I thought this would do. The result was "Anne of Green Gables". I thought girls in their teens might like it. But grandparents, school and college boys, old pioneers in the Australian bush, Mohammedan girls in India, missionaries in China, monks in remote monasteries, premiers of Great Britain, and redheaded people all over the world have written to me telling me how they loved Anne and her successors.

[about having written many other books, which never became as successful as "Anne of Green Gables":] "If I'm to be dragged at Anne's chariot wheels the rest of my life, I'll bitterly repent having 'created' her."