We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

I need to write, and I can't write when I'm on the road.

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.

[A businessmen in plane after 9\11] asked me, "What are you working on now?" And I said I was writing a story about a mouse who tries to save a princess. I was mortified. Here the world is falling down around us, and I'm trying to tell the story about a mouse who saves a princess. I said "It doesn't matter at all now."

If memory serves me correctly, and it doesn't always, Kate [DiCamillo] and I met in the fall of 2001 at the former Figlio's restaurant in Minneapolis. We were laughing within a minute of meeting - always a good sign.

When we read together, we connect. Together, we see the world. Together, we see one another.