Holly McGhee said I should come to dinner with them. That first dinner, I said something pretty smart-alecky, and Alison [McGhee] laughed really hard at it. It made me happy.

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

I am really an introvert, and I need that time alone for a variety of reasons.

If I am just home and writing, I become very strange.

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.

Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.

I didn't know at the time I was writing Because of Winn-Dixie where the story came from, but in retrospect I can see that it was a response to a terribly harsh winter here in Minnesota.