In the beginning of the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Edward is more enamored of himself than he is of anybody else. He's a very fine rabbit; he's been constructed incredibly well, and he has a wardrobe of amazing clothing. He's arrogant, and he doesn't care whether Abilene loves him or not. As the journey progresses, as he gets passed from hand to hand, he learns what it means to love. He gets more and more bedraggled, and his clothing is lost; yet he becomes finer in soul and heart than he was at the beginning of the journey.

May God strike me down with a hammer on the head before I write a book with a teach-y goal!

I thought I was going nowhere. Now I can see there was a pattern.

I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.

And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

It is always just telling a story, regardless of the age of the reader. Except, if I'm writing something for kids, I know there has to be hope. I don't necessarily feel that responsibility for adults, but I emphatically feel it for children. That's the only difference. There's no syntax difference. There's no semantics difference. There's no thematic difference.