Unselfishness. I like to surround myself with people who are kind and have feelings for others and their problems.

They can take the piss out of me and it still feels like wisdom and loyalty.

Love of fun and food and great conversation.

Knowing they are there for you.

I tell the kids that I speak with on these book tours that my greatest legacy will be the last child who remembers something I’ve said or done that helped them manage something in their life. Once I die, I will be alive through that last child whose life I helped make easier in some way. And that, I hope, could be a very long time.

And I didn’t know at that moment what my impact was. I actually fell asleep that night crying. But the next morning, my mother woke us up, and she said she doesn’t remember this dress, but it was a black with white polka dot dress. And her hair was finally properly combed.  She had for the first time in a year some makeup on, and I knew my mom was back. And that may have been one of the happiest moments of my life.

My diabetes. You couldn’t go into law enforcement [with that illness]. Now I believe in some police forces you can do that. It wasn’t possible back then. But for a then-8-year-old to have my ambition — my dream — destroyed, broke my heart.

Well, what's very interesting is that those people read our opinions which can be, at moments, rather animated. An animated exchange in writing among the justices. And many people who read our opinions think we have to be at each other's necks constantly. It's interesting we're not. When we're talking about cases at our conference it's generally a conversation. It's really a talk about what our perspectives are and why we have reached the conclusions we've reached.

I didn’t start out thinking I would be a children’s book author. I didn’t start out thinking I’d be an author at all. If you know my biography, you’ve heard that I spoke Spanish before I spoke English and struggled until my young adulthood with learning how to speak and write English properly. It was Philomel Books and [publisher] Jill Santopolo who came to me and proposed writing a children’s picture book about my life.

I think I have been mentored by many extraordinary judges in my career, but there’s one in particular that probably changed the course of my life on the court. And that’s Justice John Paul Stevens and the one year we overlapped.