The closest I can get to describing what happens is that voices come to me. I feel like I'm accessing something that is deeper and richer than me.

I remember wanting to write a book with someone, the someone being Kate [DiCamillo], and we decided to write about two friends. We had no idea how to begin this project - neither of us had ever collaborated with another writer - and I'm pretty sure that we began by giving our two friends a sock, just to see what they'd do with it. And it went from there.

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.

The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.

The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

I don't think about being a celebrity.

A friend of mine said Winn-Dixie is the way that people want the world to be and Tiger Rising is the way that it is.