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

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.

I don't know what Alison [McGhee] thinks, but I very strongly doubt that we will ever see the parents of Bink or Gollie. However, I do think it would be fun to make Tony Fucile draw portraits of the parental units and have those portraits sitting on Bink's mantel or in Gollie's kitchen. Glowering. A little.

We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.

There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.

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.

I always wanted to be a character, when I worked at Disney, but I wasn't short enough for certain characters and I wasn't tall enough for others. I wanted to be a chipmunk; I think 4'10" was the cutoff.