Kate DiCamillo

In luggage claim at the Minneapolis airport, the guy came up to me and said, \"Maybe you\'re wrong, maybe stories do matter.\" I wrote that on a scrap of paper and put it above my desk. That was the thing that pushed me through to the end of telling Despereaux, that comment, \"Maybe they do...maybe stories matter.\"

I\'m predisposed to think that as a people, we\'re hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it\'s part of who we are.

[A businessmen in plane after 9\\11] asked me, \"What are you working on now?\" And I said I was writing a story about a mouse who tries to save a princess. I was mortified. Here the world is falling down around us, and I\'m trying to tell the story about a mouse who saves a princess. I said \"It doesn\'t matter at all now.\"

Mercy Watson is obsessed with toast. What was blocking me was the challenge of trying to understand what she loves, what motivates her. That was the missing piece. Toast became the physical symbol of Mercy\'s hopefully endearing greed and obsession. Without that element in place, it didn\'t make sense.

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.

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.

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

I didn\'t know at the time I was writing Because of Winn-Dixie where the story came from, but in retrospect I can see that it was a response to a terribly harsh winter here in Minnesota.

The Tale of Despereaux came at the request of Luke, my friend\'s then-eight-year-old son, who asked, \"Write for me the story of an unlikely hero with exceptionally large ears.\"

I was visiting my mother in Florida when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened. I was working on The Tale of Despereaux at that point. I had already gone into writing it with a great deal of trepidation and fear, and then this God-awful thing happens and it was really hard to even get back home to Minneapolis.

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.

On the return flight from my mother in Florida , I sat next to a businessman who asked me what I did for a living. I said, \"I write,\" and it seemed totally ridiculous in the face of what had just happened. I mean, I couldn\'t think of anything more pointless than telling stories. He asked, \"What do you write?\" I said, \"I write children books.\"

Mercy Watson is a pig. She lives with Mr. and Mrs. Watson, who are not pigs. I had that basic premise, but I couldn\'t make it work. I would come back to it, try it, see that I was failing, and put it aside.

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.

It\'s a weird kind of disconnect that this whole story [he Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] grew around a real doll of mine, and here he is, with his \"Edward\" expression on his face. It\'s kind of reality bumping into fantasy.

There\'s a Buddhist precept that the only thing you deserve is the chance to do the work, and I\'ve been given the chance to do the work.

The Watsons have lost sight of the fact that Mercy Watson is a pig, and they love her truly, madly, deeply. They live next door to two elderly sisters, Eugenia Lincoln and Baby Lincoln. Eugenia Lincoln is horrified that a pig is living in the house next door. Baby Lincoln secretly likes Mercy a great deal.

As Elmore Leonard says, I write to find out what happens.

A friend of mine said Winn-Dixie is the way that people want the world to be and Tiger Rising is the way that it is.

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

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

Nothing new ever happens in the books. It\'s the same old theme.

Anybody who puts a book into someone else\'s hands inspires me - teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents.

I need to write, and I can\'t write when I\'m on the road.

So, yes, at least from my end. You could say there\'s a lot of Alison [McGhee] in Gollie too.

The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.

I\'m in trouble if they can\'t, because everyone\'s taller than me, and if that\'s true, that means I can\'t have any friends! Alison [McGhee] and I look very much like, I was going to say Bink and Gollie, but I meant Mutt and Jeff. We look ridiculous when we walk down the street together, because she\'s so tall and I\'m so short. But yes, tall people and short people can, and should be, friends. I, personally, like being short. I think it makes things easier.

Mercy Watson is pure fun for me as a writer, because I think of her as kind of sorbet - a palate cleanser - between larger works. It\'s always a relief to come back to her.

When it is my editor telling me how to rewrite a story, I listen and do what she asks because I have learned that I get a better book in the end. I can\'t say I\'m happy when I read that editorial letter. It is always a little painful and scary. But I have learned that - bit by bit - I can make the changes and do the work.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call \"a piece of work,\" and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that\'s the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob\'s grief.