I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.

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.

So many miracles have not yet happened.

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.

Alison [McGhee] and I have known each other since the summer of 2001. One evening we were sitting around talking about how we wished we had a good story to work on. Alison said: Why don't we work on a story together? I said: A story about what? And Alison said: A story about a short girl and a tall girl.

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 read my books out loud to myself because of the demands of the story and demands of language.