Top 44 Kate DiCamillo Quotes

Everything about writing is hard for me except for that – the names pop into my head. That’s one of the reasons why I always make sure I have a notebook with me.

I think of myself as an enormously lucky person.

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.

I was a shy, terrified kid. But I was also a kid who was lucky enough to have friends. I laughed with those friends. I had adventures. We dreamed together. I relied on them.

I hate to cook and love to eat.

I’m not going to make judgments about what people are reading. I just want them to be reading. And I think reading one book leads to another book.

I am stuck at 10 years old. I think.

I think that sometimes we open our hearts a little more easily to animals than we do to each other.

I didn’t really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

I find that when I write for children, I am more hopeful, less cynical. I don’t use different words or a different sentence structure. I just hope more.

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.

Writing a novel isn’t like building a brick wall. You don’t figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you’re doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

When you write for kids, people always ask you what lesson you mean to impart. I don’t think adult writers get that question. I never mean to teach anybody a lesson, because I don’t know anything myself.

I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.

I didn’t know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

There’s this amplification that happens anytime you tell a story. You let it go out into the world. It’s the most beautiful thing. All I can do is look at it in wonder and amazement.

Happily, I had lots of childhood heroes.

If you sit down and read with your kid, either having your child read to you or you reading to your child at a regular time each day, it deepens the relationship. You don’t have to talk about stuff; the story will do that work for you.

I had it in my head when I was in college that I wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to commit to being a writer. Up until then, I had worked one dead-end job after another while writing on the side.

You have to learn how to write each book.

It’s a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

I’ve always been a doodler.

Progress is hard to measure in any creative endeavor, I think. It’s often a matter of instinct, of feeling your way through what works and what doesn’t.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn’t writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

From a cognitive standpoint, I’m very aware that you have no room for error in a picture book. Every word counts.

It wasn’t until my fifth or sixth book where I realized I’m trying to do the same thing in every story I tell, which is bring everybody together in the same room.

I always have a notebook with me, I eavesdrop; I write down what people say. It’s very rare that one of those things will provoke a story, but I think that that kind of paying attention all the time, and keeping everything open, lets the stories come in. But where they come from is still a mystery to me.

If you read, the world is your oyster. It truly is. Reading makes everything possible.

When I was 5 years old, I moved with my mother and brother from Philadelphia to a small town in Florida. People talked more slowly there and said words I had never heard before, like ‘ain’t’ and ‘y’all’ and ‘ma’am.’ Everybody knew everybody else. Even if they didn’t, they acted like they did.

Whether it is fear of having fish pie or staying in someone’s house or not being able to tell the time, all of those things I can remember very clearly. We so often forget how big all these things are for very small children because they are so often trying these things for the first time.

Everybody reading the same book at the same time pulls people together. It does start a conversation. If you’re going to read ‘The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,’ you’re going to talk about heartbreak and loss and all of those things that people don’t talk about as a community.

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

It’s such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don’t want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we’re young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.

Whenever I am with a group of kids, I always ask them, ‘How many of you know about the summer reading program at your library and how many of you know it’s free?’ Spreading that sort of message comes very naturally to me.

Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?

I have a part-time dog. I’m actually an aunt to a dog, and he’s an awful dog, but I love him. He’s only interested in doing what he wants to do.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. The best way for children to treasure reading is to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

I read a couple of books a week. About 80 percent of what I read is contemporary literature for adults. The other 20 percent is made up of non-fiction and children’s books.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have found what I am supposed to do and to get to do it.

In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.

I decided a long time ago that I didn’t have to be talented. I just had to be persistent.

I think our job is to trust our readers. I think our job is to see and to let ourselves be seen. I think our job is to love the world.