Quotes from Kate DiCamillo

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.

I have a part-time dog. I'm actually an aunt to a dog, and he's an awful dog, but I love him. He's only interested in doing what he wants to do.

My father - he was an orthodontist - was supposed to sell his practice and move down to Florida, but that never happened... I would sometimes spend the summer with him and visit him, but he never lived with us.

My parents are separated. My father left when I was six years old.

I didn't really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

I thought I was going nowhere. Now I can see there was a pattern.

I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.

So much of writing is like walking down a dark hallway with your arms out in front of you. You bump into a lot of things.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

I was born in Philadelphia and currently live in Minneapolis. I write for both children and adults.

I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.

Writing my own stories had always been one of my dreams, but I didn't start until I was 29. I was working in a book warehouse and was assigned to the third floor where all the children's books were. For four and a half years, I spent all day, every day around children's books, and it wasn't long before I fell in love with them.

I was a very sickly kid and suffered from chronic pneumonia, which is why we moved to the warm southern climate. I think being ill contributed to my development as a writer. I learned early on to entertain myself by reading.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

All of God's creatures have names, every last one of them. Of that I am sure: of that I have no doubt at all.

May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!

I've been recognized in airports lots of places, but mostly getting recognized is at home.

No matter how hard you try to be present at home, you're always doing the things that you have to do.

If I am just home and writing, I become very strange.

Say it, reader. Say the word 'quest' out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn't it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.

In my stories for children, I sometimes show a hard, harsh, dangerous world. I'm going to show you the way it is, but I'm going to also tell you that there's every reason to hope.

What I hope is that the book [Bink & Gollie] delights children. What I hope is that they laugh and laugh and laugh, just as we did when we wrote them.

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award