Kate DiCamillo Quotes

There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.

I think of Mercy Watson like a superball; there's a bouncy kind of optimism to her stories. She allows me to play, and she makes me laugh. Hopefully readers feel the same way.

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

Most of my books begin with an image or a voice - one small thing - and I don't know what it is going to become.

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

Going out and not only meeting the kids, but meeting the teachers and the librarians and seeing the world, fills me up.

The themes in my books, like in life, are about grace and redemption and you never know when they're going to show up and what form they're going to be in. Stories emerge from keeping your heart open to the people that cross in front of you or the dogs or the mice, and their ability to open you up and enrich your life.

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.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.

Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.

To me the book is like having a kid. I have to let it go out in the world, and great things will happen. Maybe they won't, but it has to keep on moving.

Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart. (Old Doll)

I'm continually astonished with myself how different people bring out things in me that I never knew I had inside me. Each new friendship can make you a new person, because it opens up new doors inside of you.

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

I like going to schools and telling classes that when I was a child, I failed every "will this kid become a writer" test.

No matter how hard you try to be present at home, you're always doing the things that you have to do.

I think Tony Fucile, who did the illustrations [for Bink & Gollie], is an absolute genius. I've never met him.

When I do it [writing] by myself, there's a lot more terror and uncertainty.

Love is in all of the books, and that's the connective tissue between them. There's a lot of hope in me; I can feel it. These stories are balls of light for me.

I will be brave, thought Despereaux. I will try to be brave like a knight in shining armour. I will be brave for the Princess Pea.

I'm just doing what I've done my whole life, which is talking to people about books and making them read. It's what I do in my friendships. "Here, you have to read this, you have to read this."

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

Besides, who ever asked you what you wanted in this world, girl? The answer to that question, reader, as you well know, was absolutely no one.

So here I am, sending a two-ounce mouse down into a dungeon with a sewing needle to save a human princess, and I don't know how in the world he's going to do it. I have no idea. That was the first time it occurred to me that writing the story was roughly equivalent to Despereaux's descent into the dungeon. I was tremendously aware of that as I was writing. I thought, "I have to be brave or else I'm not going to be able to tell it." But it's the only way that I can write. If I know what's going to happen, I'm not interested in telling the story.

When you are a king, you may make as many ridiculous laws as you like. That is what being a king is all about.

I think we sent Tony Fucile pictures of ourselves, photos from like when we were seven years old. That's what he worked from. He captured exactly what we looked like. I'd love to do another one with Alison, not just for the joy of writing, but also for the joy of watching Tony bring it to life with his illustrations. I'm hoping at BEA, or ALA, I'll get to meet Tony and shake his hand and thank him.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

I remember wanting to write a book with someone, the someone being Kate [DiCamillo], and we decided to write about two friends. We had no idea how to begin this project - neither of us had ever collaborated with another writer - and I'm pretty sure that we began by giving our two friends a sock, just to see what they'd do with it. And it went from there.

The origin of each story is unique.

There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

That you can go anywhere in America and get a book from a library is just the most amazing thing in the world. It's not a duty; it's a privilege and it's a joy. That joy is doubled and tripled and quadrupled if you read with other people.

My favorite six letter word is always because it promises so much. My favorite five letter word is never because it insists on contradicting the promise. My favorite four letter word is once because it says it happened then. My favorite three letter word is yes because I’m just now learning to say it to my heart. My favorite two letter word is if because it makes all things possible like this: If not always If not never Then once. Yes.

He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.

She was working to remind herself of who she was. She was working to remember that somewhere in another place entirely she was known and loved.

Sometimes strange and wonderful things will pop into my head. And sometimes I will see something in the world that is the beginning of a story. I always have a notebook with me so that I can write down what I see and hear.

Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.

I feel like I've been blessed. I see the world through stories.

It is a bad thing to have love and nowhere to put it.

I actually do like traveling.

We all live in fear of getting blocked no matter what kind of art we're trying to do. It happens all the time, but I prefer to think of it as a bad day.

Longing is not always a reciprocal thing.

The undoing is almost always more difficult than the doing.

Look at me, he said to her. His arms and legs jerked. Look at me. You got your wish. I have learned how to love. And it’s a terrible thing. I’m broken. My heart is broken. Help me. The old woman turned and hobbled away. Come back, thought Edward. Fix me

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

I work full-time in a used bookstore. I get up. I drink a cup of coffee. I think, The last thing I want to do is write. Then I go to the computer and write.

You don't realize what you're going to get, and you can't prepare yourself for it.