Kate DiCamillo Quotes

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

A comic strip has a rhythm and a pattern, and you got to get in and out quick. So you set up a joke, tell the joke, and done.

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

There's a series of children's books called A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is like an incredibly dark version of Roald Dahl. I hope to start directing it.

It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters.

For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

If your opponent can make a charge in 10 words and you need 30 or more words to answer, you are going to lose that argument.

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script, and it's very linear. There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script, and then you cut that, and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

When I was starting to write, I was fascinated with 'Knuffle Bunny' by Mo Willems. I remember taking it home and typing it out, trying to figure out how it worked. It's just a classic, with dauntingly few words.