Eighth-graders who thought a passage about a pineapple and a hare on New York state tests this week made no sense, take heart: The author thinks it's absurd too.

"It's hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I'm an advocate of nonsense," Daniel Pinkwater, the renowned children's author and accidental exam writer, said in an interview. "I believe that things mean things, but they don't have assigned meanings."

Pinkwater,...