I think, oh my god, kids are reading, and they care about a book enough to come over and talk to me about a book that they care about. If I think about it as being a celebrity, it would freak me out. But I just think, lucky me, that I get to be a part of this whole thing.

Alison [McGhee] and I have known each other since the summer of 2001. One evening we were sitting around talking about how we wished we had a good story to work on. Alison said: Why don't we work on a story together? I said: A story about what? And Alison said: A story about a short girl and a tall girl.

You don't realize what you're going to get, and you can't prepare yourself for it.

In a dark time, doors will sometimes magically open and let us step inside to the warmth and light of a community.

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.

I would hesitate to say the characters [ in Bink & Gollie] are too related to either to us [me and Alison McGhee], but they certainly draw on our physical traits and personality traits and then exaggerate them to the nth degree.

In luggage claim at the Minneapolis airport, the guy came up to me and said, "Maybe you're wrong, maybe stories do matter." I wrote that on a scrap of paper and put it above my desk. That was the thing that pushed me through to the end of telling Despereaux, that comment, "Maybe they do...maybe stories matter."