And hope is like love...a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing.

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.

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

I hate to cook and love to eat.

When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn't write and I didn't create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, "She's obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too," then I feel like my time has been well spent.

There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

The book [The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] is about the fact that living in this world means that your heart is necessarily going to get broken. But the book also says that's okay. That's the only way to live a truly human life - with your heart getting broken - and eventually getting flooded with love.