Quotes from Katherine Paterson

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.

I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.

the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.

I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf -that work I abhor- then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.