Kate DiCamillo Quotes

People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

I wanted to write honest books for kids because I didn't have those when I was a kid.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

I still retain a bit of a child's focus on things, so we [with my sister] figure if we're going to write books, our best shot is to write children's books, because we relate pretty readily on that level.

Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to Newcastle. For coals.

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

No one thinks that young adults read hooks for YOUNG ADULTS, books for young adults are read by kids.

I don't want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.

The amount of response I get, in both a negative and a positive context, is completely related to the amount of books I sell, I think. It seems to have nothing to do with what I'm writing, but what degree of success I'm perceived to have.

I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.

I wasn't a pain in the ass when I was a kid. So I think being a screw-up as an adult is way more acceptable.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

There are some things that are more appropriate to a children's than an adult book but there's a huge overlapping area and most kids read an age group up anyway.