Kate DiCamillo Quotes

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

My novels are all ideas.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.

Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. However much travel one might do, however many tours and appearances, the job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn't just spring out of the library shelves.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.

Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.

My hope is that I can continue writing and, in the future, I can just be Maya Soetoro-Ng.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

I always knew I was going to grow up to be a storyteller; that's one of the earliest things I remember about myself. There was never a question of me not writing.