It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak the words that matter.

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.

Did you think that rats do not have hearts? Wrong. All living things have a heart. And the heart of any living thing can be broken.

Magic is always impossible.... It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it's magic.

The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.

There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.

The Tale of Despereaux came at the request of Luke, my friend's then-eight-year-old son, who asked, "Write for me the story of an unlikely hero with exceptionally large ears."