Quotes from Kate DiCamillo

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

I'm not going to make judgments about what people are reading. I just want them to be reading. And I think reading one book leads to another book.

I work full-time in a used bookstore. I get up. I drink a cup of coffee. I think, The last thing I want to do is write. Then I go to the computer and write.

It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

I find that when I write for children, I am more hopeful, less cynical. I don't use different words or a different sentence structure. I just hope more.

I don't know what my mother was thinking, but she entered me in a Little Miss contest - Little Miss Orange Blossom, I think it was. And I don't remember anything about that, except I have one flash-bulb memory of standing on the stage and thinking, 'This is not where I should be.'

I write in my house, at my desk, where I have Christmas lights strung over it to try and convince me that I'm having a good time. I can't really write anywhere else.

There's a Buddhist precept that the only thing you deserve is the chance to do the work, and I've been given the chance to do the work.

I am stuck at 10 years old. I think.

There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have found what I am supposed to do and to get to do it.

I think of myself as an enormously lucky person.

I think for everybody reading can be a solace, illumination, education.

This is a wonderful joke to play upon a prisoner, to promise forgiveness.

Each new friendship can make you a new person, because it opens up new doors inside of you.

While we were working, we were writing about a tall girl and a short girl, which we thought was funny, because Alison's [McGhee] tall and I'm short.