I think of Mercy Watson like a superball; there's a bouncy kind of optimism to her stories. She allows me to play, and she makes me laugh. Hopefully readers feel the same way.

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."

What I hope is that the book [Bink & Gollie] delights children. What I hope is that they laugh and laugh and laugh, just as we did when we wrote them.

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.

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.

The words, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie," popped into my head in the voice of a small girl with a southern accent. I'd been writing long enough at that point to know not to ignore that kind of red flag. The next day, I put aside what I'd been working on, started with that one sentence, and followed it all the way to the end.

Miracles and magic pervade the things that I've written, but yet there are no miracles and there is no magic.